Fire and Ice

The theme for Pennyland’s streets is coinage - appropriate given the name of the estate! I assume there was nothing accidental about the theme choice, of course.  Pennyland is a grid square located on the side of the Grand Union Canal, on the north side of Milton Keynes. It was built in the early 1980s and I recently learned that this grid square was part of an experiment - the Pennyland Project - designed to learn more about the energy-saving of current (at the time) building regulations, vs a more demanding version.  This experiment sounds fascinating as it was comprehensive, including even the layout of the houses before they were built to make the most of the solar energy. It also included control houses in Pennyland and in other Milton Keynes districts. The project was sponsored by the UK Department of Energy, Department of Environment and Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and using the technical expertise of the Open University Energy Research Group. I spent a very...

As discussed previously , some people in Milton Keynes Council get to have a lot of fun by choosing the themes and street names of the neighbourhoods that make up the new city. Admittedly, there are fewer new grid squares being created these days but I can only imagine the great deal of excitement that someone had with this! I live in Blakelands which I think was built in the early to mid-80s and it is a relatively small estate: it’s essentially a handful of streets surrounded by two industrial estates. This may sound awful but in reality, you’d hardly notice the industry as the roads are independent. We also have a lake within the grid square: Tongwell Lake . There is a path all the way around the lake which makes for many pleasant walks around there, as well as the chance to see all sorts of wildlife: we barely even notice that we are next to the M1! The theme in Blakelands is Industrial Revolution (fitting, given the location within the industrial estates, I guess) however the stre...

There are lots of weird things that appeal to me, but one of them is the idea of planned communities. I think the concept of producing a place to live in a space where none yet exists is quite idealistic. There’s something very satisfying about getting to decide what it looks like, where things are located, how it will flow, what are the underlying design principles, etc. Of course one of my favourite planned spaces is Walt Disney World which famously was built in the middle of nowhere much and everything had to be built. For decades I have researched almost every aspect of its construction and every detail is fascinating. The fact that it is still standing, still functioning and still successful is one of the reasons I admire this place so much. Closer to home, MUCH closer, is another planned community that I love learning about. It is of course Milton Keynes where I live. Here is another planned community that had its genesis in the late 60s with the first spaces built in the 70s an...