page_title: Cumbernauld
section_title: Modern times
hierarchical_section_title: Cumbernauld / History / Modern times
caption_attribution_description: English: The Underpass
context_page_description: Cumbernauld is a large town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. It is the ninth most-populous locality in Scotland and the most populated town in north Lanarkshire, positioned in the centre of Scotland's Central Belt. Geographically, Cumbernauld sits between east and west, being on the Scottish watershed between the Forth and the Clyde; however, it is culturally far more weighted towards Glasgow and the New Town's planners thought to fill 80% of its houses from Scotland's largest city to reduce housing pressure there.
  Cumbernauld was marked by the Romans in antiquity. Traces of this are still visible today for example at Westerwood and, less conspicuously, north of the M80 where the legionaries surfaced what would later be called the Auld Cley Road. This is acknowledged in Cumbernauld Community Park, also site of Scotland's only visible open-air Roman altar, in the shadow of the imposing Carrickstone Water Tower.
  For many years Cumbernauld was chiefly populated around what is now called The Village with the medieval castle a short walk away surrounded by its own park grounds.
context_section_description: The Modern era for the town can be dated from the disbanding of the C.D.C. in 1996.
  Since then, the outlook has changed dramatically and the New Town has won a number of very unflattering awards including Urban Realm's "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 Britain". As a result of this, it was featured on the BBC Radio 2 comedy programme It's Been a Bad Week, where it won the show's fictional "Worst Week of the Week Award, Awarded Weekly, on a Week-By-Week Basis" in 2003.
  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, the latest of which began construction in May 2003 for completion around September 2004. Initially the basic groundwork for the new shops began in 1997 and were finally completed in summer 2007. Designed to be a commerce centre, an entertainment and business venue and a luxury accommodation site, it was widely accepted as Britain's first shopping centre and was the world's first multi-level covered town centre. However, 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 penthouses situated within the "Alien's Head" (locals' acerbic moniker for the top section of the building) never materialised. Further expansion has been primarily to provide further space for shops. A substantial portion of the original Shopping Centre was demolished due to structural damage and has been redeveloped as a new shopping and leisure 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 brutalist 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, many of whom are the descendants of skilled workers who aspired to escape the frequently appalling social and housing conditions of the Glasgow conurbation in the 1960s and 1970s.
  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.
  The residential structure of Cumbernauld is noteworthy in that there were no pedestrian crossings, i.e. zebra or pelican crossings – pedestrians originally traversed roads by bridge or underpass. These underpasses could collect litter, sometimes smelled like public toilets, or were used by local youths trying to keep out of the rain. These are not issues the original planners anticipated, but mean that pedestrians sometimes choose to avoid them, especially at night or if they feel vulnerable. Some efforts have been taken to redress some of these matters but the problem is ongoing.
caption: An underpass in Abronhill
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