Sheer scale of retailing operations and expansion of markets beyond 1950's planners dreams ensured a slightly miniature look to these exemplary structures, as the new larger shed-like retail units and malls swamped their flanks with no-nonsense accessible blank forms. The centre was marooned.
Phase 2,
artists impression, 1964
Phase 2, water tower, 1990
Of course central Scotland was not the Los Angeles Basin. Instead of Lockheed Martin and Morton Thiokol, we had Marshall's Macaroni and the Lovable Brassiere Company for our employers.Nonetheless the shadow of cold war and space flight were a constant background to a new town childhood. Somehow, though, the idea of the Modern didn't really get to us in our daily lives; the cinema was in Glasgow, and 2001 seemed far away both in time and in space. The only way to see movies in the town was in the local community halls, on a clanky 16mm projector. Strangely I remember that the films shown always had an archaic feel; 60's war movies and 'Carry On" films. Living in the modern perhaps precluded fantasising about it, at least in public.
Alternatives to Cumbernauld- the great peripheral zones of Drumchapel and Castlemilk- have weathered far worse.For many families- including my own- it was a great move, away from inner city squalor. Suitability of site and a need to build as cheaply as possible had an effect, though. Residents handbooks emphasised the selection process for tenancy, and the personal responsibility of tenants in avoiding degradation of the structure due to such factors as condensation; the breathability and suitability of the building materials was not to be brought into question. Dampness was down to new residents having too many baths. The Golden Eagle Hotel, floating uncertainly at the edge of memory, was destined to be the first unit down in an accelerating entropic curve.
The new demographics, on one hand condemning the shop units of Cumbernauld town centre to redundancy due to questions of scale, on the other hand made some of the housing possibilities of urban density exciting once again. Not having sufficient gravitational pull, Cumbernauld became a marginal zone for a distant local authority,and lost its chance to define its own identity.
'Usually, to arrive on another planet is to acquaint yourself with its wastelands and outer suburbs. Giant robots, mutant insects and rocket ships have all come hurtling in from outer space, only to land where the skies hang threateningly over decaying industrial parks, desert ghost towns, abandoned storm drains and empty graveyards. This terrain is then doggedly sealed off and protected by doctors, cops, soldiers and scientists, fighting a staunch rear-guard action against alien incursion armed only with army-surplus machine guns, rockets and bazookas.'
In Cumbernauld, the relation of wasteland to periphery has been inverted. Architectural interest in the town now centres around its often highly successful landscaping and housing areas, and its road separation from the pedestrian.The desires to make visible the tensions in Cold War architecture which new brutalism represented have become an anachronism.
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Former "penthouses" corridor autumn 2001.Compacted rubble of Town Centre Phase 2, July 2002
" While dereliction is critiqued endlessly as a failure of economic and political systems, and a blight upon the landscape, an undercurrent of appreciation for derelict space quietly parallels and undermines the standard line. This positive regard emerges in the form of landscape aesthetics (and as heritage/industrial archaeology), valuation as natural resource (open space, wilderness and habitat), and the opportunity to engage in a range of unregulated short-time activities. Furthermore, derelict land in the UK is at the centre of proposals for housing or commercial developments." David Papadopoulos