Interview with Trevor Denton (part 2)
In part 2, Trevor describes how the City Centre housing structure plan was drawn up by a small, young team of about six over a period of eighteen months. With possibly a thousand houses per grid square, there was nothing on this scale being produced elsewhere. He comments: ‘…the three-storey townhouse type was the easiest one to speedily …meet the targets’. Overall, he says: ‘It probably took about four years from start to getting the first bit of Fishermead built’. Before they started on Central Area Housing they had discussions with several large contractors: ‘…to find out …whether or not they had the capacity’. Initially contracts were offered for 200 houses. Later they were limited to 30 or 40 houses to increase variety.
Trevor left MKDC after 1976. He refers to ‘the honeymoon period ending’ and he followed Derek Walker when he left. After working with Derek, he set up his own practice which worked well, but in the early 1990s the recession ‘pretty much wiped it out’ and he became an academic; he talks about his time as an academic and lecturing part-time at the RCA. Trevor notes that he preferred private practice to the stress of producing large number of houses in MK.
Looking back, Trevor says: ‘I think that the infrastructure works rather well and produces some really decent streets. The problem is the architecture … simply isn’t good enough …we would all have liked to have built better’. Now, he says: ‘the nice thing about MK is the park system, the landscaping is just wonderful and I’m a great fan of the City Centre’. In his opinion, the new ideas about the centre, more activity and high-rise housing: ‘would have damaging effects on the infrastructure’. His final comment is: ‘One of the key events in the whole …thirty years, for me, is the taking over of public space into private – the sale of the Shopping Building …what say did the public have in that sort of manoeuvre?’
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