‘Milton Keynes has been a joke in the eyes of the nation for decades, not anymore! The most profitable in the country outside the city of London, the town that saved the British film industry. This book is a superb overview of how the city came into being, the history, the movers and shakers, and the vision. Let’s hope the future development is planned with the same vision.’
‘Big George Webley’, Amazon.co.uk
‘[A] passionate and meticulously researched account. As an urban geographer, I found this a thought-provoking book even if, as a resident, I am as yet undecided about Clapson’s prognosis of the Milton Keynes experience. It deserves to be read well beyond the spatial confines of North Buckinghamshire.’
Cities, 23/1 2006
‘Mark Clapson’s books Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns (1998) and A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City (2004) are terrific on suburbia.’ (Dominic Sandbrook in State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 (2010))
‘As Mark Clapson points out in his punctilious retrospective on MK’s first thirty years, the culmination of the New Town movement offered jobs and houses, space and freedom. On a site designated in the late 1960s, it embodied the best aspects of that decade’s passion for starting everything afresh. Clapson is a Milton Keynes resident as well as a respected historian of planning. He painstakingly records every step in MK’s growth, from a cluster of academic ideas to a city of 209,000 people which John Prescott plans to expand yet further.’
Paul Barker, The Independent, 11 February 2005