The Times, 4 October 2004

By Steven Gardiner

Much poor work has been done in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, since its top creators departed, namely, the chairman of the Development Corporation, Lord Campbell, the general manager, Fred Lloyd Roche, and the chief planner and archi-tect, Derek Walker.

The promise which their expertise and enthusiasm generated has not been fulfilled: when the corporation was finally wound up by the Tory Government in 1992, the commercial developers were let in with the volume house builders. This proved to be a disaster for Walker's imaginative planning and his choice of architects to carry out the immense venture in the best possible manner. Unfortunately, volume house builders mean the depressing hotchpotch of planless developments of the kind cropping up everywhere, especially in the South East.

Now, however, the rush to solve the housing crisis has at last thrown up a proposal of real interest and quality, a masterplan for a section of the centre of Milton Keynes run by English Partnerships and the work of Rick Mather.

He is the architect for London's fine South Bank scheme, of the excellent addition to the Wallace Collection in London, the university building near the cathedral in Lincoln and, most recently, his effective solution for the back of the Ashmolean museum, Oxford, which has just been granted planning permission.

Mather's architecture is notable for the embodiment of humanity and coherence, and his present scheme, covering 40 hectares of the residential quarter of the southwest corner of the city's central area, down the way from the magnificent shopping centre, could be seen as a gigantic example of his capacity for both. Despite the immensity of the project, he has gone into considerable detail: from the drawings and photographic presentation in his report, an impression of his intentions is vividly conveyed.

The excellence of the project lies in the continuation of Walker's layout and original intentions. These were to create a landscape architecture composed of avenues, squares, parks and tree-lined streets, and with a scale fit for the centre of a city. This too was Walker's aim: Mather has, for instance, a length of offices along Avebury Boulevard at the central focus of his plan, something after the fashion of the traditional high street, of six to ten storeys. Opposite this, on the south side, are apartment blocks of up to six storeys. With the addition of terrace houses overlooking communal gardens, a school and its playing fields, one begins to see a picture of a series of familiar neighbourhoods - of a strong order, a plan, a continuity and a direction that is known and enjoyed in the best of urban architecture of the past.

The question remains, however, of who will actually carry out the task of designing this excellent masterplan in detail. Amazingly, it will not be Mather, but developers, of which four are now under consideration. One of them, Urban Splash, has done some very good work in Manchester and Liverpool. And it needs to be good in Milton Keynes, if this rare opportunity provided by Mather is not to be thrown away with the charge of yet another case of unfulfilled promise.