As a result of the theft of some cream, skimmed from the top of the farmer’s milk vat, young John’s mother makes an announcement. Two architects working on Cumbernauld New Town will be leaving their digs at the farm and coming to stay in John’s small cottage. These particular architects, Gerry and Alex, have not been caught creeping into the dairy in the middle of the night and skimming cream from the milk, but one of their colleagues has and so they’re all being evicted, the farmer says, guilty or not. John’s mother has been asked rather desperately by the chief architect living next door if, for an agreed sum, she will provide bed, breakfast, lunch and an evening meal. She has agreed.
John is not pleased. The architects will take the double bed upstairs in the only bedroom. John will share the living room with his mother and his sister. He’s a boy of ten. He wants a place to study. He doesn’t want to dress behind a Victorian screen and he doesn’t want to squeeze past architects shaving and abluting at eight in the morning while he’s trying to get ready for school. But his opinion doesn’t matter because it’s an urgent matter. The New Town architects need a place to stay and two of them will be moving in that day.
‘A hill in the form of a broad hog’s back about one mile wide and two and a half miles long’ is how preliminary reports describe the land designated for Cumbernauld New Town in 1955.
I’m quoting from a document called New Towns Record: Cumbernauld which was written in 1995 by Derek Lyddon. It’s a detailed 155-page book of photographs and plans, timelines and testimonies. It includes sections on Design, Housing, Traffic Circulation and the Town Centre and is the source of all the formal quotations in this essay.
ARCHIVE PHOTO – North Lanarkshire Council Archives
Cumbernauld New Town will be built for fifty thousand people, forty-seven thousand more than already reside in the village where John lives. The houses will be built in such a way that there will be ‘at least one hour of sunshine in every living room for eleven months of the year’. Pedestrians will be kept away from roads. A town artist will be appointed. The already popular theatre will grow. There will be corner shops – one for every three hundred houses. It’s a bold, ambitious, utopian idea. And, crucially, for the economists, in a proposal for the new town put before the Economic Policy Committee of the Cabinet in April 1955, Glasgow Corporation will ‘collaborate financially with the government to meet the costs of the majority of the houses provided.’ Already building high rises and low-rises and suburban schemes within its city borders, there are thousands more homes needed to replace Glasgow’s run-down tenements in which whole closes have no inside toilets and families are crowded into single ends. The need is urgent. ‘Glasgow overspill’ is the term used for the new homes in Cumbernauld.
By the time John and his mother and sister are squeezing into the single bed in the living room to accommodate architects Alex and Gerry in the double bed upstairs, years of consideration have been given to the layout of Cumbernauld New Town.
The town’s basic plan states that Cumbernauld will be different from other new towns. There will be ‘one major compact urban area with one main centre’ (the Town Centre) and it will be quick and easy to walk from the centre of the town out to open space.
Due to the quality of the land, much of it being unsuitable for housebuilding, Cumbernauld will be more dense than other new towns with clusters of housing built in close proximity separated by natural or curated woodland. Each area of housing will be linked by footpaths, underpasses and footbridges.
Roads are drawn on the map then redrawn until a final plan is struck on radial roads and trunk roads including Central Way that still bisects the Town Centre today.
High rises will be strategically located ‘to take advantage of the magnificent views . . . and to give definition in the longer glimpses of the town.’ The high rises are demolished now and opinions on the longer glimpses of the town are mixed.
Teams of architects are assigned to design each distinct area: first Kildrum, Seafar, Ravenswood and Carbrain. Later, Abronhill. And the architects can design however they like, keeping in mind the hour of sunshine rule and some other considerations such as cars.
Alex, one of the architects staying with John and his family, designs the executive houses in Park Way; timber-clad, one-storey houses with a range of bedrooms, flat roofs and plenty of sky, and then gets married. He doesn’t stay in John’s house for long, less than a year. Gerry, however, stays for some time. He’s a single man, not first on the list for the executive housing in Park Way, and welcome, anyway, in John’s house as company for his mother. John’s father has died years earlier from a scratch from a rose thorn that turned septic. His mother, left alone to raise two children, has taken her fractured family out of Milngavie, an affluent area north of Glasgow, to Cumbernauld Village. It is more affordable here for a single, working woman with children, and the additional income from the boarding architects will help. John catches sight of Gerry’s World War Two wound one morning when squeezing past the ablutions; a scar all the way from his shoulder to his belly button, thanks to a Japanese soldier hiding in a Burmese tree.
But before the sight of the scar, before the glimpse of Gerry’s rifle kept under the bed, used for duties in the Territorial Army in England to which Gerry returns on weekends, the planners are still thinking about the new town. Let’s go back to that broad hog’s back of land on which everything will be built. The planners need to keep in mind that a young, aspirational population will live in the new town first, and have children who will grow up desiring houses of their own. So where to house the pioneers’ children and the generations after them? The planners look again at the broad hog’s back and debate sites for further, future developments. Where could the new town spread and in which direction? By 1961 Cumbernauld’s target population has increased from fifty to seventy thousand and adjacent villages in the north are earmarked and developed. It’s a huge and ambitious undertaking, and one that in 1967 wins the RS Reynolds award for Community Architecture for having created, ‘already a real sense of community’ and showing ‘touching concern for residents as human beings.’
On turf-cutting day in 1957 a toddler called Iain is wheeled in his pram to a site near Kildrum Farm to watch among the gathered onlookers. His family’s cottage in South Muirhead Road will soon be acquired by the Development Corporation along with agricultural cottages and farms and he will move to a large property in Greenfaulds while the town is being built. The first turf is dug by the Secretary of State for Scotland, J.S. Maclay. A photograph of Maclay with bent legs, holding a spade with two hands, on which a neat rectangle of turf rests, shows him in the moment before he lifts the turf from the earth. Behind him there is a thickness of trees, a crowd of flat-capped, jacketed men, and in front of the cordon, a woman smiling in a stole. Their shoes are barely visible. The grass looks lush.
After the turf is cut, the houses come. And they’re populated by families from Glasgow or folk like Iain’s family who are waiting, temporarily nearby, ready to jump in first. Iain moves to Torbrex Road in 1963 and is underwhelmed at streets of new houses and a bedroom shared with his brother when he’s had the run of a big temporary mansion previously, and countryside outside his door, biking down to the Luggie, building treehouses and helping pals living in the Auchenkilns holdings with their hens and pigs. Carol, on the other hand, comes from Dalmarnock in the East End of Glasgow with her parents and sister and is relieved not to need to wash once a week at her granny’s. The new house has a bathroom and a bath. And a garden. Grace is the same. Instead of emigrating to Australia, her parents move from their tenement across from the abattoir, in the Gallowgate, to Beechwood Road, Carbrain. 1962. ‘This house, it’s all ours! Three bedrooms. A back garden. A front door. A back door. The toilet inside the house not outside. Just amazing.’
As Grace, Carol and Iain settle in, the houses are built around them. They’re still building at the end of Grace’s street. The children play in the countryside on their bikes, making fires and baking potatoes, building houses or exploring the quarries and ruins. They visit the bluebell fields in Kildrum or the haunted house of Greenfaulds. They play in the building sites, making boats and sailing them in dirty puddles. They melt tar. They sneak into workmen’s huts and unfinished houses and pick up nails and anything else lying about. The police catch Iain and his pals. Clear off, the police say but the boys come back to play again. What child wouldn’t?
Teams of architects design the houses and the building work continues. Up spring Y-blocks, L-shaped patio houses with flat timber roofs, slim houses of three storeys with the kitchen on the ground floor, single aspects, white-walled split levels nestled into hills and houses with roughcast gable ends, amid a landscape of trees and grass, cobblestones lifted from the streets of Glasgow and boulders from the compulsorily purchased farms.
I’m talking about the carefully planned residential areas so far, but I haven’t forgotten the Town Centre. We know that the spine of the hog’s back will support the Town Centre. We know that its forelegs, hindlegs, sinews and ribs will splay down into dwellings and parks and pockets of forest and lead everyone back to the Town Centre, the backbone of all this.
Potent observations are made about the Town Centre site which remain true today. ‘The site is bleak and at times very wet being exposed to the prevailing south west winds which blow down the valley and along the length of the main hill. The average rainfall is 44 inches.’ Thus it is hoped that the Town Centre ‘should be built to provide shelter from wind and rain and, if possible, warmth in the winter.’ A model of the proposed Town Centre is tested in a wind tunnel at Liverpool University. The results of the tests are unknown.
From the outset it is considered imperative that the Town Centre contains everything the new-town residents will require: civic spaces, shops, doctors’ surgeries, places to eat, drink and meet, community. And despite what we now know of the look of the Town Centre its design will be based on its use or rather ‘the functioning of the town rather than a preconceived architectural form.’
That doesn’t stop architects Wilson, Copcutt, Roberts Leaker, Aitken and Dadge, however. A medieval hill town may be the inspiration for Cumbernauld, with its carefully designed roofs and angles and outlines nestling into the slope but not so the Town Centre. ‘It is designed for the millennium,’ say the award givers of 1967. ‘The dreams of the 1920s and 1930s are being built on a hill near Glasgow.’
Iain sees cranes. It’s amazing. Cranes and columns. Concrete. Piling. Noise. Grace sees the cranes and diggers and is a little intimidated, fearful of getting too close in case something rolls down and hits her. Carol watches it develop, oh so slowly. John observes that because the Town Centre is sited on top of a hill, the workmen need to dig down first, deep into the ground. Water builds up. He sees pumps. And then he sees concrete. Concrete everywhere. A strange and massive structure coming up out of the ground. People hate it, he overhears. It’s ugly. What monster is being created? When will they put the outside on? And yet on dreich days John is reminded of a concrete ship appearing out of the mist. So, hog becomes galleon and the pig’s ribs become planks in the Town Centre’s concrete keel.
Carol plays in the Town Centre while it’s being built. She climbs with her friends to the top level that will one day house the penthouses. She squeezes through wee tunnels and plays chases with her pals. It’s dark. There are holes in the floor. Their feet scuff nails and bits of wood lying about. They fear the watchie will come. Iain too dodges the watchie. He plays two man hunt in the unfinished Town Centre, so vast that nobody ever gets caught because there are too many hiding places. Grace observes the watchie’s brazier from a distance, lit all night long to get a heat. She plays closer to home. She’s friends with three girls on her street and they take turns to sit in each other’s front porches with their dolls. They ask their mothers for old blankets and curtains which they pin to the porch and then sit underneath, playing at houses.
Gerry continues to drive back and forth to Yorkshire for his weekends with the Territorial Army and John joins him on some of his other road trips. John has found his rifle under the bed. He’s also found his guitar and plays it when he’s not there. They’re a young crowd of architects, women as well as men, and Gerry asks John’s mother to accompany him to dinners, socials and celebrations. He becomes, John says, like a ‘missing father’. Sometimes John’s mother doesn’t know when Gerry will be coming home for his tea. Sometimes the living room is full of architects as well as: ‘the New Town artist and actors and musicians. Always a sing-song.’ John sneaks down to watch from the open door, the rapidity of his growth is remarked on, and then he’s sent to bed.
Gerry designs factories. In the New Town there are separate areas for industry, for residential and for the retail of the Town Centre. Gerry takes John on his site visits and John puts on a hard hat for the first time in his life. John is good at drawing and Gerry encourages this. He’s influential on the boy; perhaps John will become an architect. He’s always liked castles and cathedrals. John’s mother is working as a fashion buyer. She dislikes the new houses, all jammed together. She tells John not to bring any girls back from any of those new houses or flats.
As Iain grows up, he gets a milk round and wakes on milky mornings, delivering to the same new houses and flats John’s mum dislikes. Sitting on the flat-bed lorry and making up the crates, jumping on and off the flat-bed lorry, getting to know whose order is whose. Running, not walking; he is not allowed to walk. Working out where he can steal a pint. Another one at it. Must be good grass for cows in Cumbernauld.
The Town Centre takes its form over the years. Grace watches it grow ‘as if it is going on and on and on and never stopping.’ John watches the ramps lead up from level to level. Most parts of the Town Centre are roofless with the ramps open to the elements. John marvels at the penthouses which really do start to look like a ship. He marvels at the rain rushing down the concrete walkways.
Then in 1967, Phase One of the Town Centre, fitted with a few shops and banks and offices, car parks, public toilets, gangways and portholes, is ready to launch. This first phase is bisected by the spine road, Central Way. With car parks underneath on both sides, the south side contains two floors of shopping space, a post office, library, town hall and office space. The port-holed penthouses sit above. On the northern side of the dual carriageway above the car parks are banks, shops and a hotel. Princess Margaret opens the Town Centre before crowds of flag-waving onlookers. Iain steals a flag as a souvenir. Carol and her family walk up soon after and visit Kay’s the Ironmonger’s. Grace thinks it’s a maze. It looks nothing like she imagines a town centre to be. But there is more to come. More shops will fill it up. Phases Two, Three and Four will follow. Phase Five, an enclosed shopping mall, will never materialise.
So, picture the Town Centre in 1967, concrete, pristine and perfect with working escalators and ramps, gleaming windows, a row of five-storey penthouse apartments, a town hall and a library. Extraordinary-looking. Yes, breezy on a windy day, yes, wet when it rains, but filling up with shops. Popular. Useful. Accessible. Full. A dazzling ship sailing across the top of a hill.
Picture John, Iain, Carol and Grace as they grow up. Picture Carol buying clothes and drinking in the Kestrel pub. Imagine Iain flicking through shelves of tackety vinyl in the record shop. Taste the pickled onions and chips that Grace buys from the chippy on a trip to the Town Centre with her friend. Picture John standing outside, looking at the megastructure, still fascinated by all that concrete.
And picture its decline over the decades.
In 1985 Lyddon writes in New Towns Record: Cumbernauld that consultants have been appointed to survey dissatisfied residents and review the Town Centre. They find problems of ‘communication between the various phases of the Town Centre’ which are ‘historic and arise mainly from the original concept of a retail development raised over roads and parking areas’ and ‘only tenuous pedestrian links’ between all the phases. They suggest linking up the malls on either side of Central Way. Or moving Central Way underground and lowering the access to the shops. Cumbernauld Development Corporation considers scrapping Central Way altogether. None of these plans happen. Instead, bits are demolished and bits are added. ‘Old bit’ and ‘new bit’ become common ways of describing the Town Centre and all its parts. Channel 4 features the Town Centre in a series called ‘Demolition’. Residents joke about it twice being awarded the plook on the plinth by Urban Realm magazine for being the most dismal town centre in Scotland.
Now, of course, most of the Town Centre has been purchased by North Lanarkshire Council and in 2027 demolition will begin. A new town centre is planned to take its place. We will see what that brings.
John, Carol, Iain and Grace are still in Cumbernauld. They’ve navigated the building with its add-ons and demolitions and still use the Town Centre today. Iain’s first job was with the Cumbernauld Development Corporation. He can recall the names of all the shops over all the decades. In his head are photographs of floorplans and shop units, some in drainpipes and colour, others in horn-rimmed black and white. He’s ‘a saver’, he says, of the Town Centre. Carol has never wanted to live anywhere else. She volunteers in a former bank in Phase One, in a bit that’s been there since the very beginning, in a bit she may have dashed along as a child in the dark, avoiding the watchie. Grace married at twenty-one and had her wedding reception, in the Abetone, a function room next to the chippy. The Golden Eagle Hotel was originally booked but had to close before her wedding day because of subsidence. She has no attachment to the Town Centre any more. It is ‘so drastically changed’. But her husband, Alan, is the pastor of the Cornerstone Church, based in the former bingo hall in the basement of the Town Centre, so she’s here, every Sunday.
And John did become an architect. He’s retired now. His career spans private practice in Belfast and Glasgow as well as many years working as an architect for the Cumbernauld Development Corporation. ‘Houses, factories. Farms, would you believe?’ he says. His trips with Gerry have instilled in him his lifelong practice of making regular site visits and now he intends to visit every one of his projects to check on it for a final time. He thinks a lot about new towns. If he was to advise anyone today on creating a new town, he’d tell them to keep the farms. The ones they flattened around Cumbernauld would have made marvellous local hubs, he says. ‘Some would break your heart.’ I don’t know what became of the farm from which the architects stole the cream. I must ask him.
John poses for a portrait in front of the Town Centre megastructure. It’s a rainy, cold day, the cloud so low it could be touching the tired rooftop turrets, strung like fraying crow’s nests along the building. ‘Can you see it coming out of the mist?’ he says of the old shipwreck. The ground is wet. The windows do not shine. John takes off his coat for the photo and straightens his colourful tie. ‘It’s not the building’s fault it’s like this,’ he says, ‘it’s not the building’s fault.’ I agree with him. To me there seems to have been genuine hope in the building’s construction and yet such despair in its neglect.
Article from the The Glasgow Herald Magazine December 7th 2024
