Ten years after Bedford architect Anthony Mackay put pen to paper to turn poor agricultural land into a new urban centre, the Chinese city of Songjiang is now home to more than 80,000 people.
Plans for Songjiang
The 72-year-old talks to HAZEL SLADE about creating a city from scratch and what the future holds.
Walking down Waterloo Road (just off Bedford Embankment) the Victorian street might not be the first place you would expect to find the brains behind one of the biggest new cities to be built in China this century.
But that is exactly where you will discover Anthony (Tony to his friends) Mackay.
Since 1961, Tony has helped create some of the biggest and best buildings, and cities, around the world - including our neighbours Milton Keynes.
But the real pinnacles of his career came in 2001 when, while working as a consultant for Atkins China - based in Beijing and Shanghai - he beat architects from China, Italy, France and Britain to win the International Urban Design Competition for the new town, Songjiang.
Now Tony’s 20sqkm design - which took him just three-anda- half months to design and ten years to finish - has become a living and breathing city just 40km outside Shanghai.
But the work for the mature architect doesn’t end there. At the end of 2009 he was told he had come second in the Songjiang South International Competition to expand the city southwards and home another 130,000 people. And although he wasn’t the winner this time, Tony is off to Shanghai tomorrow (Monday) to help with the plans.
He said: “Last year I went on a couple of visits just to walk around and experience Songjiang. It was great to walk around anonymously and experience the people living there.
“You can’t design everything.
It’s a big city and there were contributions from architects from all over the world.
“You go to China where you wouldn’t expect to be in the middle of a modern revelation, but you are. Then I come back to Bedford and there are holes in the road. It depresses me a little bit but Bedford’s a small town with fairly small aspirations, you can’t compare it with China.
“It’s exciting because they make things happen in China, it’s much less controlled than England.” Born in The Wirral on Merseyside, as the son of an artistic mother and with a brother who was an artist and another a musician, Tony was destined to live an artistic life.
But it wasn’t until a substitute art teacher suggested architecture that his career started to take shape.
He said: “Drawing buildings was my thing. A teacher saw my drawings in art class and suggested architecture to me and I just said, what’s that?” In 1956 Tony started a degree at the Liverpool School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool.
Anthony MacKay in his studio
And five years later he had his first design turned into bricks and mortar - a primary school in Somerset. But that was just the start. In 1974 Tony won the European gold medal for housing.
He then went on to become Assistant Chief Architect in the creation of Milton Keynes and designed the track at Bedford athletics stadium as well as some of the interior at Bedfordshire on Sunday’s Mill Street offices.
He has written four books on the architecture and landscape of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
And on August 4 he will be the key note speaker at the Shanghai World Expo 2010, talking about the past and future of his Chinese city. Despite being in his 70s, Tony has no plans to retire any time soon and has other projects underway in China and India.
He said: “I wish I could live longer because I feel like I’m at the beginning of another great phase in my life.” And with one city under his belt, the world could be his oyster.