In 1980 the Milton Keynes Development Corporation was thirteen years in to its project to build a new town in North Buckinghamshire. This 201st edition of “Insider”, the organisation’s in-house magazine shows MKDC at an interesting moment.
Front page news is an interview with Fred Roche, the General Manager of the Corporation, who had just announced his retirement after ten years in that post. He reflects “…building Milton Keynes has been a battle…Trying to build a city is never easy…the mud on the roads, the understandable residents’ protests in the existing villages…The whole business is a succession of crises and it will continue to be. That’s part of the job, but also part of the enjoyment of building a city”. Roche, an architect, went on to work with Terence Conran. Together they founded “Conran Roche”, a planning and architecture consultancy.
However, the real headline of the front page is the retirement of Florence Pleace, Tea Lady to the Corporation, and clearly a much-loved colleague. Florence, seventy-one, had previously worked for the Queen Mother, and was looking forward to a retirement in Suffolk, looking after a donkey called Topper.
And other interesting tit-bits? Plans for a Firework Spectacular at Secklow Gate are outlined; staff are invited on training courses including: “Introduction to Computers”; there is notice of a trip to Wembley Arena for “Tower Club” members…and then the adverts on the back page: interested in an Amstrad dolby cassette deck? Yours for £40!
We have a full run of the “Insider”, and its successor, the “New Insider”, running from 1970-1992. Taken together these publications tell the stories of the people employed to build Milton Keynes, and gives an insight more human than many of the Corporation’s official publications.
Our reference D187/14
Milton Keynes in Fifty Historic Records 