Snow and wind came suddenly to Cumbernauld on the evening we launched our book on the town centre. The Brutalist-style megastructure, a sprawling collection of concrete boxes and angles and glass with its distinctive row of yellow penthouses, was barely visible through the mist – ironic because it was this very building that we had come to discuss. Cumbernauld library was warm and full, the chat lively. Testament, I believe, to the strong feelings people have for the megastructure that has sat at the top of their hill town for over 50 years.
The town centre has been purchased by North Lanarkshire Council with Levelling Up funding and is due to be demolished within the next 10 years. To some people, the decision to demolish couldn’t come soon enough. To them the building is a leaky, malfunctioning, underused eyesore. To others, demolition would be a travesty. What epitomised the ideology behind Cumbernauld New Town – good housing and schools, easy access to shops, services, offices, apartments, civic spaces and bars, all under one roof and with no roads to cross to get there, and its iconic Brutalist-style architecture to boot – should be retained.
I have been documenting Cumbernauld town centre for the past 18 months, collecting the stories and memories of people who have lived alongside it. I’ve worked with my colleagues in Recollective, photographer Chris Leslie and illustrator Mitch Miller, and our work is presented in a new book of essays, photography, illustrations and a Dialectogram – Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld New Town. Here are some of the things I have learned.
People know their history
The older generation celebrated the significance of their new town. Many I spoke to had moved as children from poor housing in Glasgow where they shared beds and used outside toilets, to sparkling new houses with gardens, front and back doors and countryside views. One hour of sunlight in every livingroom for 11 months of the year was one of Cumbernauld’s design stipulations. “Oh, the house was amazing!” said Carol, who moved with her family from Dalmarnock. “My sister and I had our own bedrooms and my mum and dad had a bedroom. We couldn’t get over the fact we had our own garden. It was amazing.”
The younger generation knew their history too. We spoke to students from Our Lady’s High School, and Aiden, aged 17, said: “It was meant to be this modern and great place to live in the 60s. The town centre is a symbol of what Cumbernauld is – a place that was great at first and easy to make memories in, but now due to it not being taken care of, it’s become a less desirable place to live in.”
Cumbernauld childhoods were similar
The stories of the children who grew up watching the town centre being built and playing along half-built corridors and sneaking in and out of workmen’s huts were echoed in the memories of people who were children in the 80s and 90s. Michelle used to sit on her coat and slide down the ramps; Kirkland would play chases along empty corridors. “The town centre was our play den,” he said. And Eva, aged 15, who last year used to hang about with the kids who sit in the bus stations at night, talked of using secret passageways that only the security staff used.
The town centre building was their childhood backdrop, and not much has changed in that respect except there is less to do and less freedom for young people today. You need to be over 12 to visit the library without an adult. The town hall discos are no more. Even the famous St Enoch clock, where the youngsters used to meet up, has been blocked off from the public.
However, designed for easy access to the town centre, the underpasses surrounded by shrubs and bushes were disliked throughout all the decades, and many of the young people – the women in particular – felt ill at ease using them.
Unsuitable and underinvested
From as early as the 1980s, according to New Towns Record: Cumbernauld by Derek Lyddon, Cumbernauld residents were dissatisfied with their town centre. The walkways and ramps were uncovered, making it a wind trap. The megastructure was hard to navigate. The shops weren’t on ground level. Central Way, the dual carriageway which separated the north and south sides, was difficult to cross. Over the years, fixes were made: ramps and walkways were covered over, new bits were added on, other bits demolished and in 2004 a new shopping centre, the Antonine Centre, was built. However, proposals to pedestrianise Central Way or create ground-level access points were never progressed.
Today, many areas, including the penthouses, are blocked off for health and safety reasons, buckets are placed on the floor to catch drips from rain or condensation, and the lifts and escalators are frequently out of order. Many argue that the town centre is long past its tipping point. Resident Bob Davis said: “I think it’s important to stress that I’ve not arrived at the demolition position on a reflex. North Lanarkshire Council has nowhere near the resource to invest in this. So, this is as good as it gets, basically. Otherwise, all you’re going to get is incremental change and occasionally some emergency maintenance. I would say that’s what we’ve been subject to since the late 1980s.”
What comes next has to serve the community – but should it also preserve and celebrate the past?
For six weeks in autumn, North Lanarkshire Council displayed a model of the proposed new town centre. It included a community hub, a library and a pedestrianised Central Way. Residents were invited to give their opinions on the plans and to state their needs. Craig McIntyre of North Lanarkshire Council said: “The town centre has to serve the community by collaborating with them at the beginning. The community needs ownership so that they can recognise that their priorities have been realised, or hold us to account.”
What do people want? They want decent shops and places to meet, eat and gather, all of which will rely on businesses seeing Cumbernauld as a viable option in which to invest. They want good transport links; they want a bus station they can access without having to cross a dual carriageway. Easy, you might say, but again this depends on investment and on Central Way traffic being sufficiently low to justify rerouting it to smaller roads. Nothing is a given at this stage.
There are some who ask, why not retain the structure or some of the structure and make it a centrepiece, a visitor attraction, a celebration of the utopian ideals of the past and of Brutalist architecture itself? But who would pay for this and how would it be maintained?
What do the people of Cumbernauld want, and what does the community with its rich and unique history deserve?
That’s what we talked about that night in the library with the snow outside and the fog pressing against the windows. Freezing outside, maybe, but heated inside, and rightly so. These things are about people’s lives. They’re important.
Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town Centre is available to buy via Recollective’s website.
The artists of Recollective, Alison Irvine, Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller, will be giving an online talk on their Concrete Dreams project on Thursday 5 December at 12.30. Free tickets can be booked here.
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