Thatcher's Progress

Abstract

heruntergeladen über Website Dieser Beitrag kann vom Nutzer zu eigenen nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken heruntergeladen und/oder ausgedruckt werden. Darüber hinausgehende Nutzungen sind ohne weitere Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber nur im Rahmen der gesetzlichen Schrankenbestimmungen ( § § 44a-63a UrhG) zulässig.In 1979 Pete Wrong of the art collective and Punk band Crass was being interviewed by New Society about his graffiti operation on the London Underground: 'We don't just rip the posters down or spray them. We use stencils, neatly, to qualify them. Especially sexist posters, war posters and the sort of posters for sterile things like Milton Keynes.' He spits those two words out. 'But what have you got against Milton Keynes? What is wrong with it?' the interviewer asked. 'I was actually working on the plans for the place. I started discovering what a complete shithole it is. Cardboard houses, no facilities. Its just a work camp, totally sterile, offers nothing.' Guy Ortolano is wryly aware that the subject of his new history can provoke bemusement or even derision. He quotes Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: 'Milton Keynes was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.' Ortolano largely sidesteps the New Town's later reputation (which is the focus of Lauren Pikó's admirable new monograph Milton Keynes in British Culture, Imagining England). The main aim of Thatcher's Progress is historical rather than evaluative, distinguishing it from earlier histories of Milton Keynes such as Mark Clapson's Milton Keynes: Middle England/ Edge City (2004), or John Platt and Terence Bendixson's Milton Keynes: Image and Reality (1992). Thatcher's Progress uses a close, intensively archival study of Milton Keynes to make important arguments about the ideological switch from a social democratic to a market dominated polity. Histories of market liberalism-more commonly labelled neoliberalism-tend to either be concerned with tracing its genesis in intellectual history, or to treat it and its effects in highly abstracted terms. It is therefore hugely valuable to read an account that grounds a history of ideological change within the specificities of a particular time and place. This is a book in which concepts like social democracy or market liberalism are not just waves that wash over society, but things that are actively lived through and grappled with by people. It is a wide-ranging, elegantly written, deeply serious, forcefully argued book, with an impressive command of multiple historiographies. Ortolano demonstrates how a locally situated case study, grounded in the minutiae of an archive, needn't be provincial, and one of the most remarkable things to emerge from his book is how much the history of Milton Keynes happened within globally transnational networks. An important argument emerges that Britain did not become less global through becoming post-imperial. Thatcher's Progress is ingeniously structured around a driving tour Margaret Thatcher made of Milton Ke...

Cities, infrastructure and the making of modern citizenship: the view from north-west Europe since c. 1870

“…As Guy Ortolano has shown, the planning of Milton Keynes in the late 1960s was predicated upon an ideal of universal car ownership. 66 To live in this new towna spatial manifestation of the British welfare stateone needed access to this type of mobility. However, it also meant that not owning a car would significantly hinder one's possibilities for participating in society.…”