Background
Background History
During its construction beginning 1955, under the designer’s eye of Geoffrey Copcutt, Cumbernauld’s town centre’s daring megastructure architecture was highly praised. Architects, designers, town planners and students of many disciplines visited Cumbernauld from around the globe to marvel at the town, for many years heralded as a utopian construction.
Since then, the outlook has changed dramatically and the New Town has won a number of very unflattering awards including the “Plook on a Plinth” in both 2001 and 2005. In December 2005, the entire Town Centre won a public nomination for demolition in the Channel 4 series Demolition, where it was voted “the worst building in Britainâ€.
The intended core of Cumbernauld remains the Town Centre buildings, all of which is essentially contained within one structure, segmented into “phases”, the first of which was completed in 1967. Designed to be a commerce centre, an entertainment and business venue and a luxury accommodation site, it was widely accepted as the UK’s first shopping mall and was the world’s first multi-level covered town centre.
Unfortunately, the town never developed to its planned size, and the town centre has never had the life envisaged by town planners. Wealthy occupiers for the centre’s penthouses never materialised and some now lie empty and derelict. Further expansion has been primarily to provide further space for shops. A substantial portion of the Town Centre has been bulldozed due to structural damage and is now being redeveloped as a new shopping complex.
As well as the unfulfilled ambitions for the town, the passage of time has exposed serious defects in post-war concepts of centrally-planned retail and civic centres developed in the absence of proper community consultation or sensitivity to local environmental and economic conditions. This has been reflected in a country-wide backlash against modernist architecture in general. Cumbernauld’s Town Centre is widely regarded as one of the ugliest and least-loved examples of post-war design in Scotland. The confusing layout is an abiding source of frustration for both visitors and residents
Despite its bad press, from a purely aesthetic standpoint Cumbernauld is regarded as representing a significant moment in town design, and in 1993 it was listed as one of the sixty key monuments of post-war architecture by the international conservation organisation DoCoMoMo.