Celebrating 40 Years: 40 Years Ago

For 5 years a new city of glass and steel, grid squares and roundabouts, parks and trees was evolving. With a fledgling population of just 85,000, more and more houses had begun to emerge from what was once just Buckinghamshire farmland.

At the heart of this bold new city was a high street; a high street with a roof, named simply ‘The Shopping Building’. Audacious, visionary and unlike anything the UK had seen before, a building with more glass than wall, a line-up of stores previously unseen outside of Britain's major cities and the only place in the UK where you could buy a McDonald's hamburger outside of London.