“Makes Chernobyl look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” “A concrete fungus.” “Could it not be carefully dismantled and reconstructed at the bottom of the North Sea?” This is some of the recent social media reaction on the subject of Cumbernauld town centre, once internationally celebrated, an ambitious but battered 1960s building designed to house several functions, especially shopping. North Lanarkshire council wants to demolish it. Architectural experts, on the other hand, think it should be kept – the Financial Times’s critic called the council’s decision “a complete outrage”; “cowardly and wasteful,” said Barnabas Calder, an architectural historian at the University of Liverpool. The Twentieth Century Society, which seeks to defend significant buildings of the centre’s epoch, “would very much regret its demolition”.
Welcome to the culture wars, as applied to architectural heritage. It’s The People v The Experts, the caricature goes, a case of long-suffering locals being told by outsiders that they have to live with an architectural cadaver. Rightwing media outlets and fury factories crow over this “massive gulf” between popular and professional taste. Nadine Dorries, within hours of becoming culture secretary, pointedly removed the listed status of the Dorman Long Tower, a relic of Redcar’s steel-working heritage, such that it could be demolished by developers.
Like most caricatures, it’s not all accurate – Preston’s brutalist bus station, for example, which opened in 1969, was preserved with at least some local support – but in the case of Cumbernauld public feeling is unequivocally in favour of demolition. As an architectural critic, I’m usually on the side of embattled brutalism, trying to point out virtues concealed by neglect. But not this time – the building’s magnificence seems irrecoverable and its problems too blatant.
When I tour the centre, asking users for their views on its proposed removal, the reactions are unanimous: “not before time”; “it’s so unsightly”; “it’s horrible”. “Oh no, I doubt it very much,” says a librarian in the centre’s public library, when I ask her if I’ll find anyone who would want to keep it. Some Cumbernauldians speak fondly of a place that was “pivotal” when they were younger, the “epicentre of childhood in the 1980s”, but even most of them feel it is time for it to go. “I loved the building, growing up, even though it was ugly,” says Kirkland Ciccone, author of a Cumbernauld-based novel called Happiness Is Wasted on Me. “I loved the weirdness.” But now, he tells me, “we’re desperate to see it go”.
As often in tales of modernist dereliction, it started with high hopes. Cumbernauld New Town, located about 13 miles out of Glasgow towards Edinburgh, was built from the 1950s on to ease overcrowding in the old industrial city and offer a better, healthier life to escapees from smoky streets. Much of it, as seen in the tender 1981 teen romance Gregory’s Girl, is low-rise and low-density, with little rows of houses carefully landscaped over undulant terrain.
The town centre, part beast in appearance and part machine, a concrete acropolis presiding over the town, was something else. Designed by a team led by the architect Geoffrey Copcutt (“an amazing man”, according to a colleague and “wild in every way: wild beard, wild hair… suits like carpets”), it was a thing of vision. It was a megastructure. This meant that many uses – a shopping centre, a bus station, a town hall, library, homes – were wrapped up in a single composition. It stretched long and linear beside a dual carriageway, at one point also straddling it with a multi-level bridge. Intricate foothills of ramps and platforms resolved at the top into a ruler-straight human-made horizon, a kind of inhabited viaduct that, oversailing at each end on to high concrete stalks, contained penthouse apartments for the town’s high-livers.
Princess Margaret opened it to worldwide attention in 1967. It was billed as the world’s first multi-level covered shopping centre. “A soaring citadel in a meadow,” gushed Harper’s magazine before it was completed, worthy of the visions of Leonardo da Vinci, where “man” might “move freely in the sun”. The town figured in TV shows and movies. The extent to which it was ever a complete success is debatable, but time has not been kind to it. Those penthouses, perhaps too far ahead of their time to find a market, were made into offices, which are now empty and locked up. The interiors were despairingly made over with suspended ceilings and faintly postmodern plasterboard motifs. Eventually, the building was partly demolished so that the Antonine shopping centre could be added, a bang-average retail development that relates not at all, architecturally speaking, to its older neighbour.
In the 2000s, the centre started winning prizes for Scotland’s worst building (the Carbuncle award, twice) and helped Cumbernauld win prizes for worst town (the Plook on the Plinth award, also twice). According to Adam Smith, local activist and chronicler, the town is “a great place to live” – 50% of it green space, with ancient woodlands and historic buildings – which has “unfairly been given a really bad reputation. People who have never been to Cumbernauld ask where you’re from and then you get that sympathetic look.” A lot of that, he believes, is because the main route through the town is the dual carriageway around which the centre is built, such that passing traffic only get to see its “dark and dingy undercroft and delivery yards”.
It is almost impossible, if you visit it now, to find a part of it that is not a problem. Those meadows are mostly car parks or other left-over places and approaches take you via laborious ramps from peeling and echoing netherworlds to retail zones that, even on a Saturday, are sparsely used. Even if you’re looking for whatever architectural magic it has to offer, you struggle. Much of it is smothered by those makeovers. The soaring projections of that top-level viaduct, glimpsed with a little effort across service areas, are as good as it gets.
Other problems include the gathering of buckets under roofs in wet weather, the obscure location of the library and resulting loss of passing trade, the discouraging effects on elderly people of unreliable lifts, the intimidating feeling of the circulation areas after dark, especially to women. The bus station, a fluorescent-lit cave next to the big road, is grim. The building being cast in reinforced concrete, and for all that the design was supposed to be open to change, is inflexible, hard to adapt and to fix.
Many of these flaws might be blamed on poor management of the centre since it was built and clumsy alterations to it, but not all. For, despite the daring and optimism of 1960s architects, structures such as Cumbernauld town centre tended to have common faults: hostile spaces at ground level, confusing layouts, high energy consumption, difficulties of maintenance. As for the concept of the megastructure, the benefits of putting diverse uses in a single construction, as opposed to in different if proximate buildings, were never clearly demonstrated.
So it seems conclusive: the balance of benefits to costs in keeping it, of weighing a vestigial buzz of architectural ambition against numerous failings, comes down on the side of replacement. But there is still the question of embodied carbon – of the effect on climate of discarding huge quantities of concrete and steel , a relatively new but significant factor in debates about old structures. Calder, who has written books both on brutalism and the climate implications of architecture, says: “At least tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon are still in the atmosphere from the time of the centre’s construction. Its replacement will automatically have a substantial carbon footprint.” He notes that North Lanarkshire council has declared a climate emergency. The onus is therefore on them, he argues, to show they are not needlessly contributing to that emergency.
Better, he says, to find some “really good architects” who, by creatively reusing the existing fabric, can once again make Cumbernauld a global exemplar of architecture. The Twentieth Century Society similarly calls for “a radical reinvention of what remains, which would be more environmentally friendly and in keeping with the ethos of its creation”.
Arguments like this are dear to my heart and one could certainly hope for better than the bland, could-be-anywhere boxes that the council have offered by way of illustration of what the replacement could be like. But I find them hard to believe in relation to Cumbernauld town centre. The building breathes awkwardness from every pore, so recalcitrant that adaptation seems futile.
At the very least, though, thoughtfulness and evidence are called for. In which case, it would help if cases like this were removed from the conflict zones of the culture wars. Fans of brutalism should for their part refrain from accusations of outrage when local authorities propose what looks to most like common sense. When almost everyone in Cumbernauld tells them that they want the old town centre gone, they should pay attention. To do otherwise is a gift to the Nadine Dorrieses of this world.
