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Public art in Central Milton Keynes

milton-keynespublic-art

On 17 September 2011 I walked round Central Milton Keynes photographing its public art. It was a Saturday morning, and the person I’d arranged to meet for breakfast cancelled on me at short notice. I can remember taking a couple of photos and thinking why don’t I take photos of as many of these as I can?

This was early Instagram, when you took the picture inside the app or not at all, so these filtered 612-pixel squares are the only copies there are. They went to Flickr automatically, and I later gathered them into an album with descriptions (not always accurately) borrowed from the council’s Arts Guide.

Milton Keynes bought or commissioned much of its sculpture while the new city was being built, in the 1970s and 80s, and kept adding to it afterwards. The council now counts more than 270 works across the city. A catalogue and map are, according to its website, currently being developed; in the meantime its Look Again trail and Art UK between them cover most of what’s here.

Fifteen years on, a fair amount has changed:

  • The original Concrete Cows were penned round the Midsummer Oak in Midsummer Place. The oak died, and in 2016 the cows went to Milton Keynes Museum.
  • Milton Keynes Gallery more than doubled in size and reopened as MK Gallery in 2019.
  • City Gardens, home to three Schottlanders, was renamed Fred Roche Gardens in 2012.
  • Octo and its pool were listed at Grade II in 2016, and the Central Library, with The Whisper outside it, the year before.

So, as part of my broader aim to reclaim what I’ve posted to third-party platforms over the years, I’ve brought them over here, with new captions in place of the borrowed ones. In the order I posted them (they’re also collected under public-art):

Rewriting the captions turned up mistakes in the old ones, most likely from mindlessly copying and pasting text from Safari into the Flickr app on an iPhone 4—not quite the effortless process it is today. Black Horse was described as a laser-cut lightbox, a description that belongs to the next entry in the guide. And the photo I’d labelled The Conversation is in fact one of the masked figures from Philip Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons. It had been answering to the wrong name for fifteen years.