And this is the result of town planning. The new town rose in its concrete splendour in the hilly North Lanarkshire countryside from the dream of an architect/planners drawing board in the years immediately following 1956. Fifty five years later we can survey the results and judge the long term effects of this social engineering project.
The segregation of traffic from pedestrians has worked. This is a place where it is frequently quicker to walk to the centre from where you live than take the car, even though there seem to be ample car parks. The landscaping has worked - indeed there are so many trees along the roadsides between the various different parts of the town that you can think you have left the town completely. Early pictures from the sixties reveal a much bleaker appearance before the landscaping matured. And some of the architecture has worked.
But some of the architecture hasn't. The shopping centre is a case in point. 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 Britain". The website of the Cumbernauld shopping centre bravely states that the scheme was “crowned as the UK’s first indoor shopping complex... the centre can claim to be the blueprint for all premier indoor shopping centres around the country today.” The outside may look bleak but inside the pound shops, charity shops and empty units line long malls connected by confusing passages and corridors, all decorated with shiny tiles. I couldn't get out of my mind that I was in a confusing labyrinthine public convenience!
The residential areas of Cumbernauld were designed with no pedestrian crossings, (zebra or pelican crossings, or traffic lights) Pedestrians had to cross roads by bridges and tunnels. This could not last and there is now a set of traffic lights in the Condorrat neighbourhood and traffic/pelican lights were erected beside the new Tesco in 2004.
One claim to fame is that Cumbernauld was the location for the film Gregory's Girl, the well known and popular 1981 rom-com about coming of age and teenage unrequited love. I must revisit that film thirty years on and see if the locations are still recognisable.
Most of the residential areas are pleasant and the housing stock is of a high quality and at a much lower price than nearby Stirling or Falkirk. Externally some of the housing schemes with their penchant for concrete and flat roofs and the tendency to have rows of garages facing the road with the houses facing onto a pedestrian walkway can give a bleak and depressing central European communist era feel.
So does it work as a space to live and work? It has many very pleasant residential areas and, like all towns, some areas with more needs and social problems. It was built too close to established centres of employment, commerce and shopping for the town to need to be self contained. Thus it works as a Glasgow commuter suburb, now with the greatly expanded car park at nearby Croy station. (Cumbernauld station itself is on a branch line with an infrequent service to anywhere.) The lively, modern shopping centres of Stirling and Falkirk are each only twenty minutes away. It is a pleasant place to live and much more attractive than in the early days when it looked like a modernist experiment in a vast greenfield building site. (Which I suppose it was.) The award winning architecture of the centre looks tired and dated and is widely disliked.
But the people of Cumbernauld were Glasgow people, moved there in the fifties and sixties from poor tenements and substandard housing. They have triumphed through the strength of the human spirit to make the place a lively and loved community that happily ignores the social engineering that went on all around them.
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