From Govan to Cumbernauld:
Was the Solution Worse than the Problem?
The Moral Second City
In his tract Architecture and Nihilism, the ex-Marxist theorist and recent Mayor of Venice Massimo Cacciari makes the claim that ‘the Metropolis’ cannot be an industrial city. It’s administrative, bureaucratic, financial, cultural. What Cacciari was referring to was the ‘Great Cities’ of the early twentieth century, those that were in the vanguards of science and art – Paris, New York, London, above all, Vienna. On the face of it this is a counter-intuitive idea, and not even particularly accurate with regard to the cities he mentions. It’s also odd to hear that Detroit, Manchester or Shanghai were not metropolitan. What Cacciari’s notion does accurately describe, however, is what sort of a city would flourish under late capitalism, and what sort would not. It’s also one possible explanation for the genuinely tragic decline of Glasgow. Not the Second City in population since the 1950s, Greater Glasgow’s population of 1.2 million is only half that of the Metropolitan West Midlands or Greater Manchester; smaller even than the Leeds-Bradford West Yorks sprawl. Devolution has favoured the financial and administrative capital in Edinburgh more than its much larger neighbour to the west. What is surely indisputable, however, is that Glasgow was and remains the architectural, cultural, and, frankly, moral Second City of the UK. It had a chapter in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, but as that book and this one aver that it is the rightful Second City, there is no sensible reason, given that Greater London has four chapters altogether, that Greater Glasgow should not have two.
The two places covered in this journey both have claims to some kind of independence from Glasgow proper. The first is Govan, a medieval town which became a shipbuilding centre in the nineteenth century, being annexed to the Second City of Empire as late as 1912; the second is the New Town of Cumbernauld, which was populated almost entirely by Glaswegian council tenants from its inception in the late ’50s to its completion a decade later. Glasgow, like London, sprouted numerous ‘overspill’ towns planned by the Labour governments to relieve its chronic overcrowding, once among the worst in Europe. Unlike in London, but like, say, in Liverpool, those New Towns have often been held to account for the drastic decline of the city’s national and international status. London did not seriously suffer from the creation of Stevenage, Hatfield, Crawley, Harlow, Basildon and Milton Keynes; its population declined only slightly, making up most of the losses by the end of the century; its hegemonic power was not changed, it simply grew a new, better designed commuter belt. That the creation of Speke, Runcorn and Skelmersdale undermined a Liverpool that lost half its population between the ’40s and the ’90s is more likely. But Glasgow, which was partly diffused into East Kilbride, Livingston, Irvine and Cumbernauld, could surely claim that its power was thus blunted, that its teeming urban density was emasculated, that it was persistently treated and patronized as a ‘problem’. London could point at its East End as the locus of poverty and suffering, and emerge otherwise unscathed. Glasgow was damned en bloc, with the notorious post-war Bruce Report seriously advocating demolishing the entire city. The scorn the rest of the country had for it was amply reflected in compulsive self-hatred.
But there was a rather larger process at work, which it would be foolish to deny. Glasgow was among Europe’s first cities to reach the one million mark at the turn of the century – along with Vienna, Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg and Moscow – but it was the only one that was not and never had been an administrative, bureaucratic city. It was a bourgeois city, in the sense that it had what its English equivalents such as Manchester conspicuously lacked, a middle class that both lived and invested in it; but it was, more than anything else, based on building stuff and making stuff. The industrial decline of the UK necessarily meant the decline of Glasgow. This is often described as a natural, irreversible process, as though it were unavoidable that the city would decline after lower-wage industrial powers emerged in South East Asia and elsewhere. The decades upon decades of refusal to invest in the city and its industries were not, however, inevitable. The two stagnated in tandem. Research and development in technology and heavy industry continued in the late twentieth century, just largely not in Glasgow. So did investment in public infrastructure. London’s Underground transport system, for instance, was expanded further and further from the early twentieth century onwards to touch every new suburb, every Enterprise Zone. Glasgow never even got a second tube line, despite its boundaries and council estates extending further into Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire. So we end up with the current situation where, as is luridly reported in recession travelogues, parts of Glasgow have lower life expectancies than besieged Gaza.
The journey described here is an experiment, an attempt to test a hypothesis. Our title derives from a song by the Pet Shop Boys, ‘Twentieth Century’, which states a common thesis about that era of revolutions. Very bad things existed, and then very bad things would come to replace them. ‘I learned a lesson from the Twentieth Century,’ sings the Tyneside chansonnier; ‘We threw out what was wicked, and threw out what was good as well.’ The chorus runs: ‘Sometimes, the solution is worse than the problem … let’s stay together.’ It’s obvious enough what he means. Communism for one, modernist architecture and planning, for another. Strathclyde is abundant in proofs and refutations of this hypothesis, so we start with Govan, a dense and impoverished shipbuilding district, exactly the kind of place from which people were moved into Cumbernauld. The new town’s population was intended to be at least 80 per cent Glaswegian in the 1960s, and many of them would surely have hailed from these tenement-lined streets. What makes it an interesting test case, however, is the fact that Govan is relatively intact. Unlike the Gorbals to its east, or the East End on the other side of the Clyde, it was not subject to wholesale comprehensive redevelopment in the post-war decades; it had been relatively left alone by 1971, when Taransay Street here was among the first working-class tenement areas to be ‘rehabilitated’ by the Glasgow Corporation rather than levelled. Most of its tenements remained, as did its pubs, shops, cinemas, institutes and even its once-independent town hall. What did get built was fairly incremental and timid. Govan even has a still-functioning shipyard. So, although the population density and most obviously the employment has changed very drastically, the physical fabric is much the same as it would have been when Glasgow was among the ten most powerful and populous cities in the world. Cumbernauld is also an interesting test case in that it isn’t an easy punchbag, but somewhere that won numerous awards in its time, and remains to this day more affluent than many of the working-class districts in Glasgow proper. Solution, meet Problem.
The Speculators’ Zenith
The place we start in Govan is Cessnock Subway Station. The Glasgow Subway, under the control of Strathclyde Public Transport, was recently given a governmental cash injection after a period in which closure was seriously being considered. Not only was this at the same time that Crossrail, DLR extensions and the London Overground were being built in the First City, but also at the time that Glasgow’s inner motorway was being belatedly extended, its blue steel-and-concrete flyover now traversing Southside districts with some of the lowest levels of car ownership in the UK. So the Subway survives, still currently with its cute ’70s livery and design of brown bricks and curved moulded plastic, entirely intact. That redesign was the last time any real investment was made in high-speed public transport here – just to keep the single line going, never mind extending it. Cessnock, of the same absurdly small proportions as much of the Glasgow underground, has an unusually demonstrative entrance, a square archway with spiky metal outgrowths to deter anyone who might consider climbing it.
The reason we’re starting here is that the entrance is built into Walmer Crescent, a development by the architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, one of the architects who ‘built Glasgow’: an internationally influential stylist who took neoclassicism to its limits, creating an intense and robust personal language out of Greek forms that so often lent themselves to mere antiquarianism. Famously, he had never travelled to London, let alone to Greece, though his architectural legacy was taken up as far away as Chicago. Thomson was also a typical Glasgow bourgeois, a keen-eyed property developer, and here he was both developer and architect. Accordingly, Walmer Crescent is a reminder of something now rather hard to imagine – the possibility of property speculation creating coherent, convincing and attractive urbanism, although here as ever in Scotland the feudal legacy should not be discounted. The Crescent itself is harshly cubic in its details, with its masonry cut into rectilinear patterns and recesses, conflicting with the swoop of the curving streetline; the shape and depth of the fenestration contrasts on each level, and the columned top floor, as often with Thomson, is considerably more Egyptian than Greek in its severity. The Crescent is class-segregated, like most Victorian urbanism, with servants’ quarters in the basement, but none of it today looks particularly affluent. The sandstone is handsome but corroding, and in one corner shrubs are growing out of the masonry. This doesn’t mask a superbly confident and forthright piece of architecture and urbanism, but reminds you what sort of place you’re in.
Coming out of Walmer Crescent, you’re in Paisley Road, part of a long artery to the coast, built up by the more workaday kind of speculator. In Glasgow, that’s largely a very good thing, at least at our comfortable historical distance. A strongly modelled sandstone sweep takes over here, and doesn’t let go. The ingredients are exactly the same as you will find in bourgeois districts like Hillhead – soft sandstone, yellow then deep red, wide and high bay windows, mostly classical details, all on a grid structure of streets, with shops and pubs on ground floors and corners; mostly gardenless, albeit leavened by parks. There are differences, and it would be seriously amiss not to notice them – here the bays are much shallower, the rooms smaller, and the shops and pubs significantly grimmer (although the caffs are almost as good as those near the University). The masonry is also not in the sandblasted, polished and glittering state it can so often be in the West End. As an ensemble, it’s still hugely impressive, and the details reward close examination, such as the entranceways to one row of anonymous developers’ tenements, which boast rusticated columns that evoke the French utopian architecture of Ledoux.
The corner buildings are often modelled accordingly, pieces of urban punctuation, as at the District Bar pub, where a seemingly classical building bulges upwards into a prickly, columned iron spike. Remember here that in 1919 the government decided that upgrading the quality of beer might help calm the revolutionary ardour of Red Clydeside. I didn’t inspect its quality. Around here, the grid starts to offer views of ‘iconic’ post-industrial, regenerated Glasgow, in the form of two tall, metallic extrusions – the largely ornamental Finnieston crane, the tower of the Glasgow Science Centre, a bow topped with a room for the views. In the foreground are factories. Walk along here for a while, then turn northwards, through Ibrox into the centre of Govan, and these industrial structures start to loom somewhat. The tenements, though, just become even more impressive in their power and elegance, and even more alarming in their state of wear. It’s not the satellite dishes that would excite scorn in the West End, it’s the discoloured and rotting masonry – needless to say far worse in the non-‘architectural’ and enduringly grim back-ends of the tenements – but even more than that, the state of the streets themselves. The roads are potholed, grass is growing, and shrubbery emerges in the most unexpected places. Just in the near distance are two of the more elegant Glasgow high-rises, the only two in this part of Govan, both of them in multicoloured brick with glass stairways, a rare example from the spec builders who offered their services and systems to municipalities that doesn’t look shameful next to the architectural efforts of Glasgow’s nineteenth-century speculators. That the flats inside would have been more spacious, better heated, with toilets, goes without saying.
The point remains, however, that Glasgow’s urban fabric is not a great argument for the aesthetics of municipal socialism. The height and elegance of the speculative tenement is here partly supplemented by slightly later reforming efforts. The basic structure is retained, but the differences are very telling, in that they are motivated by humanism and not by aesthetics. You can see them at the corner of Ibrox Street and Whitefield Road. There are three storeys rather than the usual four (to save the back-breaking walks upstairs), no bays but also no basements, and a thin layer of stone dressing on the frontage, rusticated to make it look more earthy. The pitched roof has not been hidden by a row of battlements or chimneys. There’s hedges in front. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than the obvious fact that the problem with the earlier tenements – where the look, the public face, was more important than the people living inside – has merely been reversed. Compare them, for instance, with the prospect at the corner of Govan Road and Southcroft Street, where a yellow sandstone block turns the corner with an achingly elegant and modern circular window, leading to a row of skinny red sandstone tenements in enfilade, a melodramatic and memorable vista that could go on for a mile without getting boring. There’s a shop on the ground floor, as all the Urban Renaissance documents insisted. A pawn shop.
Nihil Sine Labore
It would be anachronistic to lament much of this, as if you weren’t in an area that was built as quick and cheap housing for shipyard workers, crowded in by the ton, with those bays a piddling concession to space in a city where two families to a room was considered acceptable. There is however one obvious absence which helps account for much of the very obvious poverty and decay in Govan, and that’s industry, the remnants of which cut a desolate swathe through the residential areas, much as it would have done in the 1890s (so no blaming post-war zoning policies here, thank you). You do see big metal sheds, and sometimes, in amongst the weeds and half-caved-in walls you see things happening in them – Industrial Springs Ltd, vast in corrugated iron with red trim, or Shearer Candles, est. 1897. You also see a lot of obviously unemployed and obviously ill people milling around, waiting for Iain Duncan Smith to procure them a bike for a call-centre job in Edinburgh. That’s not to say that Govan hasn’t made any attempt to redevelop its industrial sites, as that would be unfair. Weird new-economy colonies are interspersed with the sheds, all of them in a business-park vernacular – yellow brick, red Trespa, fun roofs – that you could find absolutely anywhere, so it’s hard to see it as much of a sign of local self-confidence. Large car parks and in-between spaces stretch alongside. There are few signs, logos or people to help detect what is happening here, nor any notable trace of activity. This, presumably, is the ‘Digital Media Quarter @ Pacific Quay’, or so says a big sign adjacent.
Your eye is immediately taken by two extremely striking things at this point, two markers of Govan’s fluctuating status. Govan Town Hall is on one side. Designed by Paris-trained Beaux Arts architects Thomson & Sandilands in 1897, it’s as impressive as the civic palaces of London Boroughs like Lambeth or Woolwich, probably more so. It’s a conventional design, without much trace of the innovations or mutations of Glasgow’s turn-of-the-century architects like J. J. Burnet, James Salmon or Charles Rennie Mackintosh. What it tries to do is just impress, and it does that amply, with its Roman portico surmounted by Scottish Baronial turrets and an Italian Renaissance dome of especially thumping proportions, all in lush and tactile red sandstone. There are improving quotes on it, such as the Latin legend ‘Nihil Sine Labore’, or Nothing Without Work, a rather bitter choice of phrase. Govan Town Hall isn’t used as a municipal building now, but is instead rented by film companies, who have the most spectacular ready-made set just adjacent should they ever want to make a Two Nations film. Just visible through barbed wire on the other side of the road is a place I covered in the previous volume of this work, a dockside regen scheme housing BBC Scotland and the Glasgow Science Centre. I hadn’t realized when I visited it that it was in Govan, that this impressive Victorian urban area was just next door – and this can only partly be blamed on my ignorance. There is simply no connection, physical or otherwise.
Walk around the corner from here and central Govan really hits you, and I mean that in the best possible sense. The faintly late-70s futuristic Govan Subway Station is right at its heart, as it should be, and you can be in the centre of Glasgow in no time. That doesn’t lessen the sense that this would or could be a great centre in and of itself. There is one fantastic building after another: a medieval church, a Victorian Printworks with a bust of the misnamed ‘Guttenberg’, among others, a 1930s moderne cinema (which oddly hides its dereliction with a hoarding showing a photograph of it in the 1930s), and commercial buildings of serious vigour and presence, linked intimately and inextricably with more streets of tall sandstone tenements; the whole disposed around a triangular public space where you can sit and take it in. The Pearce Institute is the civic focus for it all, and on the day I visit there’s a poster, indicating the evening’s topics for discussion. ‘Central Govan Tenants and Residents: 1. Housing Association Issues (the entire Glasgow housing stock became a charity case a few years ago). 2. Cuts in Public Services. 3. Policing. 4. Factoring.’ These offer a pretty clear picture of what is on Govan’s mind.
There has been quite a bit of post-industrial development in Central Govan. There’s an ’80s shopping mall, not as awful as these usually are, avoiding a complete destruction of the urbanism around it, but its blank red-brick lines were surely more at home in Milton Keynes. Slightly more interesting is a residential extension of the centre based on brick, render and metal tenements. At first, it locks itself onto the existing urban structure, continuing a line of Victorian flats, albeit with an uncomfortable blockiness. When it approaches the Clyde, that structure breaks up, but is replaced with nothing worthwhile – driveways and vague, car-centred spaces for the pedestrian. More interesting is a mini-estate designed by Collective Architecture for the Govan Housing Association, in less clichéd materials: a purply brick that goes well with the red all around, and gold-ish panelling. Like many Housing Association areas it can’t clearly decide whether it’s a new, public-spirited piece of public housing or an aspirational alternative, aimed at affluent outsiders. That’s because it’s both. A blocky tower and low-rise terraces work their way reasonably intelligently into the urban fabric, although I’m perhaps being kind because of the contrast with a nearby post-war estate, which is a completely typical example of the sad decline of Glasgow architecture after 1945. Just a series of three-storey, grey-rendered tenements with pitched roofs, vaguely arranged around scrubby green spaces, with nothing either positive or negative in them, a nullity, an entropic zone overbearingly invigilated by CCTV. Whoever commissioned these evidently didn’t think they lived in one of the world’s great cities; his counterparts at Whitehall would surely have agreed.
Reach the Clyde, and there are two enormous grey sheds, on either side of the river. One of them is the Riverside Transport Museum, a back-of-an-envelope design by Zaha Hadid. Amusingly, the best view of it is offered by a kipple-ridden space just off Govan Churchyard. The river is fenced off, and in front of it there’s scrub, a sofa, several cushions, plastic bags, rugs, cardboard boxes, shipping containers, bollards, and some parked taxis. The Museum itself is a remarkable engineering feat tailored to the architect’s overweening ego, an ethically neo-Victorian design where a prodigious metal structure is immediately masked by a tinny skein. It’s a good place to test the architectural avant-garde’s pulse, this, as Hadid’s partner Patrik Schumacher has described this kind of digitally-enhanced shed-creation as the logical successor to constructivism – a style as appropriate to post-Fordism as modernism was to the post-war consensus. The up-tick logo of the roofline and the effacement of work and technology is an infuriating exercise in whimsy and vacuity, but the Big Shed typology used here is not inappropriate. It’s hard to say the Riverside Museum is alien to the urban context.
Just opposite, on the Govan side, is the last remnant of Govan’s shipbuilding, the white and blue steel shed of BAE Systems Surface Ships. Deindustrialization is real enough, but in Glasgow as elsewhere it should not be exaggerated. That this survives at all is the eventual result of one of Red Clydeside’s most militant actions, one which is especially relevant during the current crisis – the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-In, in the early 1970s. Edward Heath’s government were determined to let ‘lame ducks’ die, and the under-invested and under-resourced Clyde shipyards were meant to go away quietly, downsized, closed and sold off to the highest bidder. Instead, Communist shop stewards led a ‘work-in’, to prove that the yards were viable, and even more importantly perhaps, viable under the control of their workers. In that, they presaged the co-operative autogestion movements that took over factories in Argentina last decade. Largely due to the work-in, the shipyards were nationalized and kept going through the 1980s. The shipyard in Govan was privatized in 1988, and inevitably, it’s now operated by a subsidiary of BAE, the arms-dealing behemoth that is arguably neoliberal Britain’s most successful economic entity. It could be argued that this corporation, formed out of several formerly state-owned bodies and aided by great government largesse, is the logical successor for the Clyde’s former industrial expertise. BAE Systems Surface Ships has a revenue of over £1 billion. It’s hardly struggling. Yet I’ve often heard it suggested that the cranes of the old shipyards are what you see above the tenements in Govan, rather than those of a working factory for destroyers and attack ships. Here it all still is, hiding in plain sight. It employs far fewer people, and there’s the rub, but you can still see ships being built from the Glasgow Harbour luxury flat development, on the other side of the river. Much as it might still weld together warships, there’s not much false consciousness on the part of Govan – the SNP’s position on the Iraq war didn’t stop them electing its deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon as their MSP.
Modern Boys, Modern Girls, It’s Tremendous!
You can, if the trains are running on time, get from here to Cumbernauld in about thirty-five minutes. Subway to Buchanan Street, into Queen Street station, then a short journey through north-east Glasgow and a brief, hard-to-spot ‘green belt’ and you’re in the New Town, the alternative, the putative solution to the problem that was and is Govan and the places like it. There is a cheat involved here. We could take a much more circuitous route to the peripheral estates of the Glasgow Corporation, to Easterhouse or Castlemilk, where we could find the nondescript estate off the corner of central Govan reproduced on an enormous scale; but instead we’re going to a place which won every architectural award going, and which was immortalized in celluloid in the dizzy teenage utopia of Gregory’s Girl, a 1981 film which presents an enormously flattering picture of the town, notably by making sure it never presents an exterior shot of its most famous building. More of that later. Cumbernauld has roughly the same population – around 60,000 – as many of the outlying Glasgow estates, although again, we find a poor argument for local government and democracy.15 The elected Glasgow Corporation too often created sloughs of despond, formed as if by accident; the unelected quango that was the Cumbernauld Development Corporation managed to create something that, it is soon evident, was taken very seriously, with great sensitivity clear at every level of the design. That shouldn’t have to be true, and in, say, the contrast between the GLC or Hatfield Development Corporation, it wasn’t, but here the unflattering difference (you’ll have passed Sighthill and Red Road on the train up) is undeniable.
The first sight of Cumbernauld as you exit the rather meek SPT station is intriguing – an axial progression of terraces, with an underpass placed in the middle. The one non-‘new’ building, a rustic row of shops with a café, is off to the side, but it’s as if it has been put there for reassurance. The district nearest the station is called Carbrain, and like most of Cumbernauld it is fairly low-rise. Cumbernauld was a ‘mark two new town’, so it took into account the criticisms that were applied to the Attlee government’s efforts, from Stevenage to East Kilbride, which were thought too dispersed, too suburban, too monofunctional. The other major ‘mark two’ town is Milton Keynes, a place specifically designed so that you could drive through it without noticing, with nothing originally allowed to be taller than the tallest tree – a faintly psychotic way to design a town, though frequently rather elegant if you get out of the car. Cumbernauld wisely didn’t go as far as this, but it introduced a road system that presaged its Buckinghamshire relative, where the pedestrian does not at any point have to cross a road, and the driver never has to wait at a traffic light. To your right is a row of six-storey tenements, with a svelte pedestrian bridge protruding from them. They’re in what you soon find is the dominant Cumbernauld material, brick with grey render, which unfortunately is usually stained or otherwise discoloured. At the roof, the brick takes over, forming around curious semicircular windows. There’s snow on the ground. It feels a little bit like the outskirts of Kiev.
In front of you, however, is the signposted route to the town centre, so it is in this direction that we proceed. A greensward surrounds the underpass, with long grey terraces rising one after another, on a hill. Within a few minutes you’ve already seen more greenery and felt more space than you would in an hour in Govan, and evidently that was the point. The underpass itself has been ‘designed’, with faceted little panels, and it’s very wide and spacious. The houses display a design which at first it’s hard to decide is clever or stupid. They’re again in grey render on brick, they have pitched roofs, and they are very, very small, albeit with larger windows than the Glasgow municipal norm. To the back of each row is a garage, though cars are still parked in the street. But why, you wonder, have they basically recreated the Victorian terrace on an even smaller scale? Just outside of Glasgow, of all places? Soon you notice two clever things. Each terrace on the hill has been arranged with its neighbour, above and below, in mind. Every view upwards or downwards is surprising, with odd angles and views of the hills just outside the town. The pedestrian principle is especially pleasing here, with the whole thing unmarred by the slightest hint of traffic. Then you notice the landscaping, which is heavy, great big cobbles of rubble set into all the places you’re not meant to walk, but without resorting to fences or spikes; occasionally with boulders dropped onto them. A wonderful way to design something this simple – we’d rather you didn’t step here, but if you’re going to, we won’t stop you. And immediately, the craggy, mountainous, northern topography has been taken into the design of the most basic built fabric.
The absence of certain things you see a lot of in Govan starts to become felt. There are no shops, by which I don’t just mean a lack of bookies and pawn shops, but of any shop at all. No pubs, either. I stumble instead onto a Free Church, a modern design in wood and harling that doesn’t appear to have been touched since 1975, with very neat typography. Up to this point I’ve been following the signs to Cumbernauld town centre, but then the route is blocked by a new development of exurban-looking houses in closes, and the sign doesn’t have anything to say about this. So I try to skirt it, passing another, bigger church, again of very modern design, and a secondary school, and a heart-in-mouth view of the ensemble billowing downwards. After a while of this I worried I might end up getting terminally lost here, so retraced my steps and took another route entirely (the earlier sign was more permissive), through a park.
There was a townscaper of genius at work here. The landscape architect of Cumbernauld was one G. P. Youngman, and much of what made this walk especially enjoyable can be put down to his talents. A winding pedestrian path weaves through what you abruptly realize is not, in fact, a park at all, but what Cumbernauld has instead of streets – hillocks on each side, a wooden walkway, thickets of trees. You could be in a nature reserve, or one of those BedZed-style eco-buildings extruded out to form a town, but you definitely couldn’t be on a street. This, in theory, is bad. Streets encourage life and stuff. Take away proper streets, and chaos and mugging apparently ensues. Yet I saw as many people on this path as I did on Govan Road, and they didn’t look especially menacing, although one told me I wouldn’t find much to photograph round here. That Glasgow municipal self-esteem problem moved here, too.
The houses vary wildly in their treatments, although they were all designed of a piece, by the development corporation. Their lead architect, Hugh Wilson, was co-creator of the Arndale Centre in Manchester, but like his partner, Sheffield Municipal Architect Lewis Womersley, he deserves better than to be remembered for it. The two architects seemed to share a great deal – the only place I’ve been that combines such total modernity with intense local and topographical specificity to this degree is the Gleadless Valley in Sheffield. The houses, now, are less neo-back-to-back than those downhill. They’ve got gardens, but they also look more modern and more crisp. Some are worn and almost derelict, some in fine nick, with no obvious pattern as to why and wherefore, no obvious slum area or affluent area (that, too, was deliberate). Right to Buy obviously hit Cumbernauld fairly hard. Perhaps the only real caveat about this place is that it’d be a little tricky for the unfit, and I find myself slightly out of breath from all the ups and downs. At the underpass, stairs go up to a bus stop, but not to a road; pass through and you’re finally at the town centre.
Adapt and Destroy
Now, if it weren’t for three grey tower blocks in the near distance, you really could be in Milton Keynes, but for the aggressive Strathclyde-in-January weather. That careful urban structure you’ve just walked through is replaced with a large surface car park. The landscape has gone from being fascinating and unique to being a landscape that you have seen in a million different places, a million times. Retail sheds on the motorway; a Tesco Extra, with another even bigger car park in front; a PFI college, with a Blair Hat on top; a covered shopping mall. The golden arches look out over all of it, and for the first time so far, you spy a CCTV camera. There are other things, more clearly of the era, to be seen. Non-avant-garde modernism is represented in offices for Lanarkshire Council, low-rise and smart, and a larger, vaguer brown brick block; the avant-garde are represented in another college building, a worn but imaginative and clear Brutalist cruiser designed by Andy MacMillan and the late Isi Metzstein. Clever bits of landscaping and pedestrian routing can be found in amongst all the subtopian vagueness, but really, you’re clutching at straws. Its contrast with the centre of Govan, never mind the centre of Glasgow, is in no way flattering. So how, you would be right in asking yourself, did this end up being the centre of a town which up till now appeared so sensitively and thoughtfully designed?
Cumbernauld town centre was originally supposed to be one single building, of a sort. Its designer, Geoffrey Copcutt, proposed for the site a ‘megastructure’, which was to rise out of the topography as a great rocky outcrop. Megastructures were a mid-1960s Big Idea, a rearrangement and radicalization of modernism into huge, allegedly adaptable and extendable organisms that provided all the density, diversity and life so palpably absent from many of the more Platonic modernist showpieces. Habitat ’67 in Montreal is probably the most famous; the Brunswick Centre and arguably the Barbican in London show traces of it, as does Castle Market in Sheffield. Japanese architects specialized in megastructures for a while. There’s an obvious problem with them as theory, which is the combined attempt to provide a clear and legible image in a fixed and heavy material, usually reinforced concrete, and at the same time provide something light, adaptable and changeable; but if managed well enough there is no reason why a megastructure should not work. Shopping mall owners may not be the ideal clients for such an entity.
So Copcutt’s town centre was built to include pubs, libraries, welfare centres, restaurants, nightclubs, bowling alleys, shops, bus station, offices, and had a row of penthouses at the top. The architect intended a few other things too, which never quite came to pass: there was apparently ‘a mosaic of sites I had tucked in for flea-markets’16 in there somewhere, as well as space for hotels. You now realize that the absence of pubs and shops in the residential areas was not entirely stupid, as the entire town was planned round this place, with the intention that nowhere would be more than a fifteen-minute walk from its metropolitan bustle. When pondering it, you have to keep in mind the Apollonian grids of most post-war New Towns, their clear and neat pedestrian precincts without much in the way of drama, complexity or conflict. You have to think of a rainy day in Billingham, as that’s the sort of thing the architects had in mind as what they wanted not to achieve. Nonetheless, the main event, as in any New Town, was evidently the shopping, and it’s that which caused the downfall of Copcutt’s idea. If it was a shopping mall, and an unsuccessful one at that (at first), then it was to be judged on those terms. For that he cannot quite be blamed; although the choice of bare concrete in weather like this was perhaps unwise, if not without a certain craggy grandeur.
All this at first is fairly academic, as walking round the car parks in the town centre you can’t at first find any trace of Copcutt’s original building – the structure which won ‘worst building in the UK’ awards for a decade or more, the place memorably described in the Poujadist television spectacular Demolition as ‘a concrete spaceship from the planet Crap’. It’s hard to hide a building this big, but they’ve almost succeeded. You have to walk to the corner between the blank, pink-walled Antonine Centre (the Roman Wall ran nearby) and the typically sub-Foster Tesco Extra, where you’ll see it just above the service areas and the lorries, the long row of porthole-windowed penthouses raised up on one prodigious piloti. They’re still inhabited, apparently. It’s infinitely more interesting than the shopping centre and the supermarket as a work of architecture, though its ferocity is hard to deny. Walk up some stairs, miraculously still public, and the sight is genuinely shocking. It’s like a concrete shanty town, with a series of seemingly random cubic volumes ‘plugged in’ to the larger structure, all of them in a drastic state, their concrete frames with brick infill looking half-finished, which alarmingly may have been intentional. One of these pods has a little doorway into a branch of William Hill, which is possibly the single bleakest thing I have seen in composing this book. After that, you realize where you are – the service areas of the building, so at the point where glass walkways carry pedestrians, and the only reason for you to be here is to wait for a bus. Walk into the bus station, and the surfaces are lined with mosaic and tile, and you realize that somewhere hidden in all this is a space designed with as much love and intelligence as the housing around it. It’s damned hard to see it, underneath all that has followed since.
This, again, is in some ways the fault of the original idea. Those walkways are passing into a row of long, featureless and windowless sheds, the kind of ultra-rationalized non-architecture that the strongly modelled and sculptural skyline of the original town centre building is clearly trying to stop in its tracks, to eliminate before it destroyed architecture as a discipline entirely. Copcutt must have realized that the most truly adaptable buildings, those capable of transforming themselves with the same speed as society and production were transforming in the 1960s, were Big Boxes, where partitions inside and walls outside could be fabricated, removed, moved and expanded with great ease. His move, and the megastructural move more generally, was to try and create a form of building that could do all of those things and still be as vivid, interesting, diverse and architecturally pleasing as the historical city, without of course reproducing it. They must have seen themselves as a last line of defence, and in a sense they were, and that’s how we ended up with Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Museum. The sheds swallow up the architecture here, that’s for sure, but they also prove the original building’s capacity for adaptation, as they all are still part of the same organism, still all connected. Inside, there’s not much to feel optimistic about. This intrinsically adaptable building has indeed been adapted, as was intended, just as it has been expanded. The original high ceilings were lowered to the usual shopping mall level, with the usual ’80s fibreglass neoclassicism all around. There are several different pound shops.
One aspect of the original design that surely hasn’t changed is the occasionally baffling complexity. Like many cities (but unlike Glasgow), the structure and plan is completely illegible to the outsider, and the map placed to ‘help’ the pedestrian is more than slightly terrifying. After a while, you realize there are at least three malls here. One is Copcutt’s original, with its narrow, arcade-like structure, which might once have been enjoyable; another, slightly later, a big box with a space frame roof; and then the new Antonine Mall. This is reached via a weird and empty passageway, with nothing but beige walls for company until you come to an enormous mock-Victorian clock, screened off by a glass wall in case anyone would want to vandalize it. I felt like having a crack myself.17 The shops here are nicer, cleaner, proper normal retail chains like you would get in a normal mall. Next, Costa, Dunnes. After this I walk out and get completely lost trying to exit the complex. Copcutt’s scheme, its majesty and folly still palpable, looms proudly out over the car parks and the mess, and then you find yourself at another entrance, a glazed atrium of classic 2000s form (wavy roof, Wetherspoons and all). Next to it are statues: ‘The Shopper’, from 1981, by Bill Scott, presents a mother and baby in bronze. She looks lost too. After lots of wandering, I get out, to somewhere every bit as gorgeous as the area I’d found myself in on my way to the shopping centre.
Scotland, Scandinavia
Maybe it’s the relief at finally finding my way out of the town centre, but I don’t think so. The northern suburbs of Cumbernauld are glorious, an architectural triumphal march that doesn’t stop until you eventually wind your way back to the town centre (it is, after all, built like that). You take some stairs up onto a ridge. A path leads off it, lined thickly with trees – a forest planted just next to the town centre, coursing between the estates. The tall trees are then dispersed across an area of houses spilling down a valley, all with gently pitched roofs, and tightly planned pedestrian paths running through them – again, you can pass through several ‘streets’ without having to cross a road. There’s a little modernist church, in slightly better condition than the one in Carbrain, though there’s still something unpleasantly Temperance or philanthropic about the way Cumbernauld’s residential areas are planned around parish churches rather than pubs, cafés or leisure centres. There’s a school just next door, a straightforward ribbon-windowed box. The houses are geometrically organized, with weatherboarded links between pebble-dashed masonry, but not in the sense of subsuming everything into a pattern, so much as informal, pretty, even. Three tower blocks in the distance lie beyond a concrete underpass, detailed in a raw béton brut that fits perfectly with the roughness of the landscape and the landscape architecture. Passing under it feels entirely logical, a pathway under a main road than doesn’t even feel like an underpass. It is a feat to design infrastructure with such a degree of seeming informality and ease. There are new, mid-rise blocks of flats just by the underpass; architecturally, their mild-modernism is fairly appropriate, but the most obvious difference has been the collapse of these carefully, ingeniously planned in-between spaces. They’re just blocks with car parks in front. Wasn’t that what the 1960s was blamed for?
Through all this you’re walking downhill, and at the bottom of the hill is Seafar, an estate of tower blocks and terraces. The three towers are in exactly the right place, enhancing the already vivid sense of enclosure and warmth in this woody, bosky area. They too are arranged around a car-parking area, although there the similarities end. The New Town was designed with the assumption that each household would own a car, and whether we consider that a good thing or not, Hugh Wilson and the town’s architects tried to achieve the seemingly impossible – to design a dense, coherent, non-suburban town that had a huge amount of car parking while being accessible and pleasant for the pedestrian. So the parking is arranged into a circular concrete garage, like a crescent of bungalows for vehicles. That’s not the most impressive thing – what takes over here is Youngman’s landscaping at its most crazy and baroque – the winding path round the garages to the towers has at its edges a sculptural sweep of raised cobbles, so organic and bulging that it looks more like an abstract sculpture than a type of paving. Truly, Cumbernauld boasted the Gaudi of pavements.
Turning left from the towers, there’s a development of terraces, again stepping sharply down the valley; in between there is bosky, Nordic planting. The grey and brown houses look completely of this landscape, completely of their place, without at all evoking any specific Scottish form of architecture, neither baronial castles nor tenements. The paving is set at angles down the hill, with the cubic, Bauhaus-Caledonia houses set at angles, with bushes at the corners. Thin trees rise out of them. These communal green strips are again demarcated by melodramatic landscaping – more boulders crashed down here and there, as a small reminder not to walk on them that doesn’t need ‘keep off the grass’ signs. Walk up the hill a little bit and you can see snow-capped mountains in the near distance. There’s a small plaque at the end of one of the terraces: ‘Saltire Society Award for Good Design, 1963’. It’s not unusual to find old Civic Trust plaques on neglected, rotting post-war buildings, but though a Wallpaper* reader might blanch at some of the porches and additions made by residents to their terraces, surely this place has been used in exactly the manner in which it was intended. The contrast with the town centre is overwhelming. How unusual that it’s working-class housing rather than a shopping centre that best represents the place’s local pride.
Walking back towards the town centre, the houses lie more dramatically into the landscape, with especially steep pitched roofs set in rows. The town centre buildings look marginally less horrible from this angle, less subtopian, with at least some hint of the original ideas, where you see Copcutt’s concrete extrusions passing over a main road with another small, conservative modern church next to it. From here, an underpass to Kildrum, another of the 1960s areas of the New Town. The underpass offers views of some typical Cumbernauld employers – Fujitsu, the Inland Revenue, both evidently taking advantage of the low rent and motorway connections, much as they would in Stevenage. Like most New Towns, Cumbernauld was built up largely, if not exclusively, with council housing, but either employment patterns or the Right to Buy has made much of it look unexpectedly affluent; turn your eye back to the view of the town centre, though, and it’s hard to credit it. The worn concrete megastructure and its big-box parasites look drastically sick. The underpass is, like the rest of the landscaping, designed in a heavy, rustic, organic pattern, filtering the pedestrian under the motorways to the centre with great tectonic gusto. Then you’re at another series of terraces placed downhill. This time, the clipped modern designs and the density of wintry trees seriously evoke a northerly version of what we’d seen at New Ash Green. There are bungalows off the main pathway, under the trees. There are worn but elegant metal shelters along the road adjacent, with cars parked in them. At the end of it, the underpass to the next estate has taken the organicism to comic heights – a gaping maw, a practically medieval archway. By this point I’ve gotten myself lost again, and ask for directions. I’m told, kindly enough, that if I don’t know the town I’d be better off taking a bus. The bus stop is out of service.
So I decide instead to go for another walk, to test the theory that everywhere is no more than fifteen minutes from the town centre. Forest paths lead to a striking, verdigris-clad factory. Then, uphill, more houses with steep pitched roofs and bulkily landscaped pedestrian paths, their peaks and falls accentuating the drama of the topography. There are new additions in between, in a nondescript suburban vernacular, again punctuated by nothing but car parks, but it’s small enough to ignore. Through the town centre again (quicker than I had expected, evidently it’s not that hard to get used to) and walked back to the station through Carbrain, with more elegant, dense housing that seems to have gone to seed faster than most of the rest of the town. At Greenfaulds Crescent, you find the only part of the New Town that seems to have followed a ‘normal’ street pattern, with cars parked on a street with houses facing each other on either side. It doesn’t seem any more or less successful than the rest of it, despite being the only part that contemporary town planning wisdom would consider sensible or even feasible.
The paradox of Cumbernauld is how such a well-kept and captivating residential town can have allowed its town centre to have become such a subtopian horror. That might be to do with the basic vagueness of the New Town idea in the first place. If it’s seen, as it easily could be, as a far-northern suburb of Glasgow, then it doesn’t matter so much that central Cumbernauld is a disaster; if it’s seen as the heart of a distinct town with its own identity (something it undoubtedly possesses), then the absence is a very serious urban defect. Did it ‘solve’ the problems of Victorian Glasgow, though? It certainly avoided every possible urban pattern of Glasgow, without the slightest trace of the tenement tradition, and without the tiniest hint of the Chicago-style metropolitan brashness of the Second City; but, unlike most of Glasgow’s own estates, Cumbernauld replaced what it destroyed with something positive, something with its own pattern, its own locality. There’s no reason why both can’t peacefully coexist. Not that the New Town should be seen as some admirable but misguided experiment. About halfway through my walk through Cumbernauld, I realized I’d only seen anything similar on the outskirts of Stockholm, where forests and lakes are interspersed with sensitive, cleverly landscaped working-class housing. Given that the Scottish Nationalist left like to hold up the surviving Welfare State consensus in Norway or Sweden as their exemplar for the Scottish Republic (as opposed to other feasible comparisons, like Ireland or Iceland), that’s very apt. Here is a New Town which looks on brief acquaintance like an exceptionally successful piece of social democratic, Scandinavian urbanism, a place that an Alvar Aalto or a Sven Markelius would recognize as kin. Its mistakes are obvious, and rectifiable. We could imagine it becoming a model for the new settlements of an independent, leftist, intensely local Scotland. Though England may face a Tory hegemony forever when Scotland secedes, it’s hard not to wish them luck.
