Interview with Neil Higson

In the early 1970s Fred Roche invited Neil for interview in MK for a Landscape Architect post. Tony Southard was Derek Walker’s preferred candidate but Fred offered the job to both candidates, dividing the responsibility. Neil had reservations and refused, initially taking a job in Manchester. Offered work by Fred later, in 1975, he was pleased to leave Manchester, and set up a practice in Stony Stratford, for which Fred provided some project work from MKDC. In 1977 Neil says: ‘Fred … really pressurised me to set up the Central Landscape Unit’. He describes how he brought together 20 to 30 Landscape Architects into the new Unit; in his opinion, it worked tremendously well. He recalls writing for Fred an assessment of Milton Keynes’ environment: ‘Milton Keynes is suffering an identity crisis’, which he presented at Executive Management Committee (EMC) [See MKP/012/03]. Neil discusses issues he faced in 1977: his disappointment at the quality of housing; and Derek Walker’s apparent lack of success in achieving the landscaping vision in the Master Plan. Neil talks of his strategy of planting semi-mature trees to create an instant landscape. He admits he ‘probably’ consistently overspent, but believed: ‘It’s the only way I can get anything worthwhile … to create the kind of place Milton Keynes wants to be’ and was supported by Fred. He also acknowledges ‘Frank Henshaw’s clever manipulation of (financial) columns’.

Neil recalls Dutch Elm Disease and droughts of 1976 and 1977, which: ‘just wiped stuff out; some of the planting techniques …were, in drought conditions, doomed to failure’. Neil ran the Landscape Unit from 1977 to 1988. He says: … my reason to be on earth was to make Milton Keynes’ landscape work’. As for expenditure on landscaping, Neil says: ‘I did add it up …and it was a tiny percentage of the overall cost of making MK happen’. At almost every year end there would be money available because of underspend in other Departments, which could be spent on quick landscaping projects, using the large stocks of trees available in the nursery. Neil says: ‘That was a valuable means of achieving the landscape of Milton Keynes’.