Cumbernauld is the kind of town you pass through but never stop at. In my youth, I glimpsed the strange concrete structure at its heart from the window of the Glasgow bus many times. But I had no idea that this typically grim example of Sixties brutalism was a building of cultural and historical significance.
Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.
In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.
Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.
When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.
Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.
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