Stuart Whipps made Necessary Amendments alongside a film of the same name, and the book carries that project’s structure onto the page. Six related parts hold together a deliberate opposition: video stills of public artworks around Milton Keynes are laid over reproduced pages from MK Insider, the staff newspaper of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. Public sculpture in a new town usually announces what the place hopes to be. The cartoons in the house paper show something messier, the humour and assumptions of the people who actually planned and built it.

Around that central pairing the book gathers further material: stills from Open University films, also made in Milton Keynes; writing drawn from the town’s earliest residents; photographs of the town as it is now; and a new text by Honor Gavin. The result reads less as a survey of municipal art than as an archaeology of a specific postwar idea of the future, assembled from documents that were never meant to be exhibited.

MK Gallery commissioned the work as part of City Club, a programme of art, performances and talks inspired by the original vision behind Milton Keynes. It ran during the gallery’s interim period, while the building was closed for construction. James Langdon designed the softcover volume, which runs 128 pages with colour and duotone plates at 240 by 305 mm, published by MK Gallery and distributed by Loose Joints in 2019.

For collectors, the interest lies in how Whipps handles source material. Rather than illustrating a thesis, he lets institutional imagery and its internal jokes sit together on the same spread, so the reader has to negotiate the gap. The book is a considered object as much as a record of the commission, and it preserves a project tied to one town’s self-image at a moment when that image was being renegotiated.

Photographs by Stuart Whipps; text by Honor Gavin. Published by MK Gallery, distributed by Loose Joints.