Milton Keynes

Yesterday I took a day trip north of London to Milton Keynes, a surprisingly large, blandly modern "new city" that arose within my lifetime as a solution to housing shortages in greater London. Britain built several of these "new cities" in the middle of the last century. In this case, Milton Keynes swallowed up several smaller villages, including one that was its namesake, originally known as Middleton. It gained the Keynes when the de Cahaignes family controlled the manor in the Middle Ages; the Norman name later became Anglicized. One of the best-known Keynes descendants is economist John Maynard.

Anyway, I didn't pick Milton Keynes entirely randomly. There's an exhibit there at the moment of the photography of Saul Leiter, a mid-century New York photographer and painter whose work I admire. I thought I'd catch the show as well as take some pictures of my own.

I rode the train up from London (fun fact: there's a town on the way called Leighton Buzzard) and disembarked in late morning. The plaza in front of the train station is a candyland of pastels. I walked the wide, optimistically named Midsummer Boulevard into town, and at first I wasn't all that impressed. Milton Keynes is too new to be cool; it doesn't have the retro pizzaz of '50s architecture. It looks like a branch bank built in about 1984, with all the charm of a plastic bouquet.

But there is a lot of greenery and spaciousness, and by the time I got out to the Light Pyramid, a sculpture by Liliane Lijn standing on a bluff in a large park overlooking the valley, Milton Keynes was growing on me. (The Light Pyramid lights up for special events, but obviously I didn't see that.)

The middle of town is a gigantic shopping center. I browsed the mall for a while, although it was heaving with people. I had lunch and then went to the Leiter exhibit.

Leiter's photographs tend to be dreamy, mostly urban images with lots of layers -- he loved shooting through railings and past curtains and walls and cars, often grabbing just a fragment of a human figure beyond. He liked rain and snow, umbrellas and hats. His paintings, which are also part of the exhibit, are colorful abstractions, some of which he apparently used as bookmarks.

When I emerged from the gallery, the sun was out, which transformed the cityscape and gave me some more photo opportunities. Maybe not Saul Leiter quality, but not too terrible.

I slowly made my way back to the train and got home in mid-afternoon.

Last night we watched "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," with Maggie Smith, on a DVD that I rescued from a library purge years ago. I've seen it before but for some reason I didn't remember it accurately. I thought it was the student played by Pamela Franklin who dies in the Spanish Civil War, but it's not -- it's a different girl entirely. I have the weird feeling I've realized this on past viewings, too, but it seems that erroneous memory is embedded in my brain for good.