Interview with Christopher Woodward

Christopher comments on his huge admiration of Peter Smithson, having worked for him for 7 years. He and Ken Baker were offered posts in Milton Keynes by Derek Walker, who said: ‘I’m setting up a team and I want you to work on the centre’. Asked why he chose Milton Keynes, Chris says: ‘It sounded ridiculous …but it’s worth a try’. He recalls reading the Master Plan and sketching out ideas; he comments on sections of the plan which motivated them, saying: ‘Stuart, I and the team had no problem with the Master Plan for CMK’. He brought ideas from his work on ‘Traffic in Towns’ for the Ministry of Transport and recalls their initial diagrams of the grid, with boulevards, secondary and tertiary roads and building blocks. He describes the CMK team & their roles (Stuart Mosscrop led, Syd Green and Chris worked on the mall, Ken Baker on detailed infrastructure with engineers). He recalls discussions on size and the decision that this ‘regional shopping centre’ should be built all at once rather than in phases. Chris describes their design methods, putting up: ‘beautiful huge black and white drawings, covering a wall’. Stuart would then present the designs and accompanying costs to Executive Management Committee (EMC) of MKDC; Chris says: ‘he was a very good negotiator’. Syd dealt with practical issues: ‘you can’t do that, we couldn’t get the lorries round the corner, etc.’ Simultaneously, negotiations were going on with tenants about their requirements; Chris led the negotiations with John Lewis.

Chris explains their reasoning for having two open spaces: ‘one on the west end (the square with the fountain) and Middleton Hall on the east end. In his opinion, the shopping building: ‘is extremely cheap: a very rudimentary structure, uses very little steel, it’s got hardly any foundations, the roof is made of tin’. But it has expensive travertine marble flooring. Chris is not impressed by the architecture of MK today; in his opinion it is ‘breathtakingly unmaintained’. He considers that: ‘…the monument (for CMK) will be the landscaping. I think those boulevards are wonderful’. He would have wanted ‘fiercer development control’ to avoid what he describes as the ‘architectural trash’ on the other side of the road from John Lewis.