Over the last six months, a fascinating battle over the future of one of Scotland's most innovative (and unloved) architectural experiments has been taking place a dozen miles outside of Glasgow. Following the announcement in March that North Lanarkshire Council intends to demolish The Centre in Cumbernauld and build a 'multi-purpose Town Hub' in its place, it was revealed last week that Historic Environment Scotland (HES) is considering an application to grant the Brutalist urban experiment listed status.
While the Council maintains that their acquisition and demolition of The Centre represents a 'huge step forward in the regeneration of the town', to allow Cumbernauld's infrastructure to better fit its residents' 'vision of a modern town centre', the local petitioner who is seeking to stop the bulldozers argues that an 'imaginative and thoughtful refitting and refurbishment' would allow it to be made fit for purpose for the next six decades.
For those unfamiliar with the most populated town in North Lanarkshire, which is bisected by the M80, Cumbernauld was designated as Scotland's third New Town in 1955 and was intended to accommodate 70,000 of Glasgow's overspill population across between 1,500 and 3,000 hectares. As Robin Cook noted in his and Gordon Brown's
Scotland: The Real Divide, post-war schemes in the West of Scotland – as well as the New Towns themselves – were intended to ease the pressure on already overcrowded housing stock and remedy the fact that 40% of all deprived households in Scotland could be found in Glasgow.
It should be noted, however, that Scotland was nominally – as Gordon Brown's
Red Paper made clear – in surplus, having reached 'housing suffiency', although the quality of these dwellings was the primary problem facing local authorities, with 28,000 households in Glasgow lacking an internal toilet as late as 1971 and 46,000 not having access to hot water.
As Professor Douglas Robertson argues, the New Towns were also a product of the Scottish Office's desire to 'impose its authority over the municipalities … and exert greater influence upon the Scottish economy' as the country's professional bureaucracy sought to ensure a 'planned transition from an industrial structure dominated by heavy industry' to one centred on lighter manufacturing and consumer goods.
Aesthetically, The Centre – which was deemed Britain's 'most hated building' by 10,000 viewers in December 2005 – continues to divide opinion. For
Prospect Magazine, the commercial centre of Cumbernauld (and the eight-story-high 'Alien's Head' which juts out over the most unlikely looking branch of William Hill) most resembles a 'rabbit warren on stilts'.
By contrast, for the architectural historian and director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, Miles Glendinning, Cumbernauld was a 'world-leader in the 1960's era of utopian modernist visions for cities', characterised by 'avant-garde
space-age architecture and bristling with steel-grey fins and antenna-like projections'.
As the Town and Country Planning Association notes, Cumbernauld was designed around a single town centre on a hilltop, using a 'whole-place approach' which pursued 'urbanity as a way of life' rather than the 'neighbourhood' methodology of earlier post-war constructions. Cellular units arranged around the giant town centre ensured that a pedestrian could reach the town centre within no more than 20 minutes and Cumbernauld's abundance of shops, schools and churches (as well as an ice rink, bowling alley and library) was intended to be in direct contradiction to the colossal housing estates of the 1950s, such as 'The Drum' which Billy Connolly famously described as 'a desert with windaes'.
As the UK faces both the severest cost of living squeeze in generations and a chronic 'housing emergency' of surging prices and shortage of supply, the appeal to HES to list The Centre claims that its destruction would not only be 'historically shameful' but 'environmentally ludicrous'. During such a critical moment in our climate emergency – with COP26 in Glasgow concluding just six months ago – Heriot Watt's Dr Caroline Brown has questioned whether we can afford the 'carbon cost' of demolishing and then replacing a concrete structure and repurposing its component parts.
Likewise, as I argued in the pages of
Scottish Review in October 2020, the surviving examples of these modernist colossuses are concrete and steel embodiments of an important moment in Scotland's recent history when scarcity and social idealism intertwined. However aesthetically divisive they may be and for all their architectural faults and structural weaknesses, developments like Cumbernauld were the antithesis of what Teddy Jamieson has described as today's increasingly 'bland anonymous new architecture' and the 'upwardly mobile moving into homes once designed for working-class people'.
However, four months on from the publication of the UK Government's much anticipated
Levelling Up White Paper – which seeks to bring about a 'long-term programme of change to unlock the potential of people and places in every part of the UK' – it seems an anachronism to make do with a 'seriously grim' post-war relic when there is the national political will (even if the government have steadfastly refused to release any new funds) to tackle regional inequality and transform neglected towns and cities. Despite the UK Government's announcement that £212m from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund has been earmarked for north of the border, it should be noted that academics including my QMUL colleague, Dr Paul Copeland, have argued that, without more autonomous governance and greater private-led investment, the
Levelling Up agenda will be 'nothing more than a rhetorical device to appease northern voters'.
Given the notoriously poor relationship between Downing Street and Bute House, it is not surprising that the Scottish Government has said that, while it welcomes any additional funding, it is 'unacceptable' for the UK Government to 'again be deciding how money should be spent in areas of devolved responsibility without any meaningful consultation or engagement'.
However, despite the controversy over the UK Government's decision to bypass the Scottish Government to deal with local authorities,
Levelling Up has put a renewed focus on the vast imbalances between Scotland's regions as well as individual cities and outlier towns. According to the Office for National Statistics, the inequalities within Scotland are nearly as stark as the UK, with Edinburgh being listed in the top 10 of ITL3 regions for GDP per head in 2019, while both East and North Ayrshire sat in the bottom 10.
Despite one historian's claim that North Lanarkshire Council’s proposal is 'cowardly and wasteful', the balance of probability is that The Centre will be demolished in years to come, with Jamie Hepburn (the MSP for Cumbernauld and Kilsyth) announcing that he intends to recommend that HES rejects listing to allow Cumbernauld's 'long overdue and much needed regeneration'.
Academics and citizens alike will debate the merits of the Council's 'Town Hub', but The Centre's existence is concrete proof that the government's
Levelling Up White Paper is just the latest incarnation of the same spirit that built Cumbernauld. Without better governance and lasting funding, today's efforts to 'level up' could face the same fate.
Tom Chidwick is a contemporary historian, who splits his time between London and Edinburgh
