Several years ago, I volunteered for an assignment in Milton Keynes. It would last two days and involve an overnight stay. At the end of day one, I checked into my hotel and headed out for a jog. I’d spotted a park on the map and figured an out and back run, including a circuit of the park, would be about 5k – perfect for an evening run. Best of all, the route looked very straightforward i.e. easy to memorise on the hoof (this was before Smartphones, Strava, and Google maps).
Things started going awry almost as soon as I left the hotel. The road to the park had no pavement so I ran on the grass verge – not ideal but do-able – but pretty quickly even that stopped. There were too many cars to continue along the road. I was confused. How do people (sans car) travel in Milton Keynes?
The answer, I discovered, is by a network of underpass walkways. Running under roads was certainly safer than running on them but, deprived of visual landmarks, I lost my bearings almost immediately and spent the next half hour running along underpass after underpass after underpass after underpass after underpass. When I eventually found the park a circuit was out of the question – the sun was beginning to set – and my focus was finding my way back to the hotel before dark.
Later that evening a friend told me MK had one of the highest suicide rates in the country. I’m not sure if that’s true now (or if it was then) but it sounded plausible. I’d been in MK less than 24 hours and was already deeply unsettled by the place.
Like me, Beryl Bainbridge was unimpressed when she visited MK, the final stop on her English Journey or the Road to Milton Keynes. This was in 1983, 50 years after writer and broadcaster J B Priestly had written about his own journey through England (English Journey, which I reviewed in an earlier blog post). By way of tribute BB is taking the same route he took in 1933. For Bainbridge, this includes the new town (now city) of MK, built in the 1960s. “Went to bed thinking that if Milton Keynes had been in existence fifty years ago Priestly would have made a detour around it.”
Sorry if you’re from MK but this also resonates: MK can be summarised as “a series of motorways circled by endless roundabout, with the houses hidden behind clumps of earth.” The problem? A flawed dream. “They (the planners) hadn’t given a thought to the mothers with young babies in prams, the old on a pension, (anyone) who didn’t own a car. The success of the enterprise depended on the motor car.” In other words, it wasn’t built for real people or a real community. BB “began to despise it”. Ouch!
English Journey or the Road to Milton Keynes had been on my radar since reading Priestley’s English Journey. I’d looked forward to reading Bainbridge’s ‘celebration’ of Priestley’s classic book. Perhaps I expected too much. It turned out the real “celebration” was a documentary series by BBC Bristol in which BB was taking part; the book was a spin-off, in effect. That perhaps explains why at times it reads like a diary or journal with descriptions of what she’d been asked to do by the film crew.
BB starts in Southampton, as Priestley did, and follows his route (Bristol, Salisbury, the Cotswolds, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Stockton-on-Tees, York, Lincoln and Norwich) but many of the places he went to are missing from her itinerary (such as Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, and Blackburn) – possibly the programming budget wouldn’t allow the full tour?
To be fair, BB is doesn’t claim to be a social commentator like Priestly (“I was not an objective traveller”). Still her overall conclusion seems rather half-hearted: “the English are a surprising people. How tolerant they are, how extremely eccentric, and how variously they live in the insular villages, the cosy cathedral towns, the brutal wastes of the northern cities. And I thought that was about it, one way and another.”
The Preface is more insightful. “I had thought his (Priestley’s) England would be different from mine, and in a sense it was, but it was a matter of substitution not alteration.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
On the plus side (no pun intended), Bainbridge’s book includes anecdotes from her childhood and early career as a young actress in Rep. Theatre. So you pay your money and you take your choice. Do you want funny or a travelogue? It’s not that great a travelogue – and her novels are funnier.
Rating: * Not for me (but worth a try) Beryl Bainbridge won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1977 with Injury Time and again in 1996 with Every Man for Himself. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and in 2011 was posthumously awarded a special Man Booker Best of Beryl prize for her novel Master Georgie. Click on the links to read my reviews of those books in earlier blog posts.
whatcathyread 
Hello Cathy, and thank you for your many ‘heads up’ on a wide range of books.
Here is an anecdote that might give rise to a chuckle. Around 2005 I was on my way to a QAA review of the Open University. I caught a taxi from Milton Keynes station, and the driver, a chap of Indian heritage, was a most cheerful and courteous character. On the journey I told him I had never visited MK before although on many occasions I had whizzed through on the train keeping a watchful eye out for those concrete cows standing quite inert in the grassy meadows. I asked the driver whether he enjoyed living in MK, and what was it like. In a moment of real excitement he threw his hands up off the wheel and exclaimed ‘”The drains, the drains!!” And then explained that the town and later the city had been planned in advance of the building of any housing, and that all drains had been laid out in the most regular and well designed manner. “So, you see”, he continued, “one of the good things about living here is that no-one ever experiences a blocked sewer.”
Hello Peter, what a lovely story! Thank you for taking the time to share it.