by Tim Moore
I fired Craig up and trundled off through cheerless residential terraces faced with crumbling flapjacks. An adulterated sign welcomed me to LOWER METHIL POOFS. I stopped by a corner shop and came out with breakfast: a mince and onion bridie, which sounded like something Hannibal Lecter might cook up on honeymoon, but was actually just a rather dull pasty. Contains gluten, ready to eat, delicious hot or cold, at least once you’ve nipped back in and bought that big jar of mustard.
Waiting at the till a second time I spotted a notice on the counter, apologising to patrons that in accordance with new laws passed by the Scottish parliament, they were unable to sell alcohol before 10 a.m. I wasn’t sure what seemed more extraordinary: having to clamp down on people buying booze at dawn, or saying sorry to them for doing so.
‘We do have our problems,’ wrote one local in response to the Duke of Edinburgh’s non-apology. ‘As a teenager I was too embarrassed to admit I came from Methil. Twenty-five years ago we had a certain reputation because of ladies of the night. Now it’s unemployment and alcohol.’ Dunking the last flakes of bridie into my pot of yellow fire I wondered if a self-fulfilling prophecy was at work. Methil certainly sounded less convincing as a town than as the street name of some life-blighting homemade intoxicant. And when it comes to exploring novel and dangerous means of inebriation, no one puts in the R&D hours like a Scotsman. Let us take a moment to honour the Glaswegians who laid down their lives in perfecting the formula for a ‘corporation cocktail’: domestic coal gas bubbled through a carton of milk (I’m afraid I’m not making this up). And what of the doughty ‘lacquer lads’, whose tireless empirical zeal introduced a whole generation of Scottish tipplers to the refreshing tang of lemonade infused with hairspray? Metal polish, cleaning fluid, shoe dye – you name it, some curious Scot has drained it in one, whooped with exhilaration, and dropped down dead. In fact, it occurs to me that the morning booze ban is in fact a dangerously retrograde public-health measure: all across Scotland, people are now tiding themselves over until 10 a.m. with Hammerite and coke.
‘Left at the rowundabowed, f-f-f-first exit.’ Obeying Ozzy at the bypass intersection I realised I was turning back for home. Geographically at least, Methil stood top of the crap-heap: north of this point, and with apologies to the Aberdeen publican feted as Britain’s rudest man, Scotland was simply too nice.
The hours ahead were spent on persistently tedious dual carriageways, the flat and featureless landscape swept away behind embankments whenever it threatened to undulate in a diverting manner. My foot eased down further on the accelerator, drowning out the sitar solo that was there to drown out Naomi Campbell’s voice. I settled into a dangerous trance-like state, and when Ozzy shook me from it – F-f-fookin left turn ahead! – I noted the speedo juddering around 85mph, and Craig’s shrill related displeasure. I checked the oil in a Lidl car park: down once more to the blackened dregs of his sump.
I’d enjoyed many a happy surprise on my journey, but hardly expected Scotland’s ugliest beach to provide another. I won’t deny that the small curve of harbour-walled foreshore at North Queensferry East Sands was lavishly bestrewn with manmade detritus: in place of sand, the Firth of Forth appeared to have been edged with the disgorged stomach contents of a blue whale fed on landfill. But I couldn’t have cared less. The watery world to my south was framed on either side by thrilling, mighty Forth-spanners: the Humber-esque, concrete-towered 1964 road crossing, and – towering right above my unworthy head – the iconic 1890 rail bridge, a cantilevered triple-jump across one and a half miles of deep, cold water. Snippet for those whose loins remain stubbornly undampened by really enormous bridges (what’s wrong with you?): the perpetual-painting thing is a myth. Snippet for those who just changed their trousers: in Network Rail’s considerable inventory, which refers to every building and structure as an index number, the Forth rail crossing is listed simply as ‘The Bridge’.
The sun was gently sinking behind the becoming cluster of old roofs that was North Queensferry. Theatrically side-lit, the heroic steel-girdered backdrop haughtily overpowered the micro-horridness below my feet. Our shores would of course be far lovelier places if sailors stopped kicking oily flip-flops overboard, or dolphins were taught to eat aluminium. All I know is that with the sun setting on a view like that, I would happily have put a deckchair down on Scotland’s ugliest beach and not even noticed the Strongbow bottles and lengths of mossy plastic rope heaped around my knees.
‘It is different, and because it is different, it is controversial.’ If you didn’t know what the ‘it’ was, these words, and their narrator’s severe and sombre delivery, might steer you towards something like the compulsory irradiation of school milk, or national socialism. In fact, they’re the introduction to a 1970 promotional film entitled Cumbernauld: Town for Tomorrow, voiced by Magnus Magnusson and thus rich with such phrases as ‘integrated uffisses’ and ‘cellular housing unerts with every ammennertee’.
The camera is slung from a helicopter, showing a lone Transit van negotiating the first in an Olympic logo of broad, landscaped roundabouts. ‘In Cumbernauld there are no streets in the old sense,’ Magnus intones, throttling back a sneer. ‘Access to all parts of the town is via a complex road system designed exclusively for motor cars.’ Then we’re panning slowly along a terrace of wedge-roofed concrete homes with small, irregularly positioned windows: ‘Not just a new town, but a new concept in community living.’ We cut to a beehived waitress carrying a tray of dimpled pint pots across an enormous orange lounge, then zoom through the wall of angled glazing behind her to a young roller skater traversing a deserted plaza and disappearing into a pedestrian underpass. ‘Farewell, little fool, trundling off into the void. Sorry – did I say that out loud?’
In early-evening darkness I muscled Craig through Cumbernauld’s roundabout belt, and towards the stilt-propped flanks of its centrepiece ‘megastructure’. Just as Brutalism’s given name was enough to have had the movement stifled at birth, so Cumbernauld town centre’s chief architect should have been dispatched straight back to the drawing board after selecting this word to describe his vision. But when Geoffrey Copcutt’s enclosed conglomeration was opened in 1967, everyone loved it. Prospective residents and architecture students from around the world came to gawp in wonder. How their cries of praise and amazement must have gladdened Geoff’s heart as he led them through the pedestrian walkways: ‘Is this the fullest realisation of megastructure as an avant-garde urbanist conception, or what?’ Because his creation was so much more than Britain’s first indoor shopping mall – eight storeys high and half a mile long, Cumbernauld town centre was a one-stop shop satisfying every municipal, retail and leisure need of a town of seventy thousand, built around its own ensuite dual carriageway. Bonus!
A drive-through KFC flashed by on one side of Central Way, a McDonald’s on the other. Then it was into The Megastructure: an eerie and unpeopled concrete corridor, vaulted by the occasional walkway, broadening on occasion to accommodate a taxi rank or a line of glass doors. Ramps, stairwells, underpass, overpass, then back out into the sculpted grass embankments and roundabouts. It was a sprawling, utterly anonymous environment that at the same time seemed strangely familiar. A couple of f-f-fooking second exits later it struck me: this was exactly like one of those curious, lonely journeys from the long-stay car park in an airport courtesy bus, with The Megastructure standing in as international departures.
In defiance of the empty car park before her, the receptionist at Cumbernauld’s Premier Inn insisted she had no rooms to offer: I was beginning to wonder if I’d found my way on to some budget-executive-chain database of undesirables. And so it was out through the final roundabouts to an upscale motel called the Red Deer Inn, where I paid £52 – a new record – for artfully arranged bed pillows and a view of the many surrounding relief roads and bypasses.
‘You rilly dinnae want to do tha.’
The youth at reception had looked flummoxed by my enquiry about bus services into Cumbernauld, an
d followed up with genuine concern when I proceeded to ask him the best way to get there on foot. I took his point. I knew it couldn’t be more than a couple of miles, but I also knew – Magnus had told me – that Cumbernauld’s ‘complex road system’ was no place for pedestrians. The entire town had been laid out on the understanding that every single household would own a car and would use it for every single journey. There wasn’t a zebra crossing or even a set of traffic lights anywhere in Cumbernauld until 2004, when one of each accessorised the car park at the town centre’s new Tesco Extra.
As a rule I find it very easy to resist any defiance-based challenge, but watching the receptionist puff out his cheeks as he grappled with the unthinkable intention I had outlined, I felt a twinge in my underworked tenacity gland. Buying an Austin Maestro, eating a chicken parmo, failing to dash a booted heel into the stereo as soon as Orville the Duck’s voice came out of it – this entire journey was predicated on doing things that people had told me I really didn’t want to do. And so with a jut of the chin I strode outside and made off towards The Megastructure, in a direction that Google Maps has just informed me added almost a mile to my journey.
I hit a dark main road and found it edged with a comfortable swathe of pavement. Just as I was beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about, this degenerated into a gravelly border, deeply scored with the wayward skidmarks that betrayed it as a run-off area for drunk drivers. After jogging over a couple of roundabouts I found myself descending the slipway to a much busier and much larger road: in fact, as I noticed when it was just too late to consider turning back, a dual carriageway. Armco and steep embankments now distilled the pedestrian options to a central reservation laid with green-painted railway ballast. Progress was awkward and unsettling. The few motorists going slowly enough to notice me honked their disapproval. Naturally it began to rain, impairing my vision and adding a vicious swoosh to every elbow-brushing neeeeeeeEEEE-OWWW. Half a mile on another roundabout took fuzzy shape before me, and over-excited by a rare gap in the traffic I pelted across it. This manoeuvre propelled me on to a four-lane bridge slung across a four-lane underpass. So popular was this route, and so narrow its kerb, that after a nerve-shredding close encounter with a van’s wing mirror I turned myself sideways, inching across crab-fashion like a novice cat burglar on a high-rise window ledge. Rain from without soon met sweat from within: I stumbled into the boggy verge at the other side sodden through and shivering. Through slitted eyes I saw the carriageway ahead fanning out into some complex multi-looped junction. One of the signs hung above it directed traffic to a suburb called Carbrain; under the roaring swish I could hear Magnus baiting me triumphantly. I stood there for a while, strobed by speeding headlights, feeling wet and helpless. Then I squinted at the grass embankment alongside and noticed a muddy upwards track, worn into it by two generations of lost and desperate feet. A drawn-out tug of war with gravity and traction brought me to the summit, and a footpath that wound dimly off towards the shadow of a cellular housing unit.
Cumbernauld was first designated in 1955, largest of four new towns intended to rehouse the occupants of Glasgow’s abysmal tenements, 15-odd miles to the west. Seventy thousand of them were to start new lives in what the tirelessly hubristic press coverage dubbed ‘Scotland’s modernist utopia’. The mood of heady portent was captured by the New Towns Committee in their initial report to the Government: ‘It is not enough in our handiwork to avoid the mistakes and omissions of the past. Our responsibility, as we see it, is rather to conduct an essay on civilisation, by seizing an opportunity to design, evolve and carry into execution for the benefit of coming generations the means for a happy and gracious way of life.’ As the first clutch of four-storey blocks took shape in the gloomy drizzle, it was clear that someone had got hold of that essay on civilisation, and blown their nose in it.
‘Small sturdy cottage homes that set their shoulders to the wind, houses that grow out of the ground itself.’ Thus had Magnus described Cumbernauld’s housing stock, in terms at variance with the endless residential slabs I recalled from Gregory’s Girl, the coming-of-age romantic comedy filmed in Cumbernauld in 1980. Though only a few years old at the time, the geometric terraces were made to seem outmoded and rather silly, dream-homes for a flared, Formica future that even in Scotland had already been fast-tracked into the embarrassing past. (Gregory’s dad, of course, was a driving instructor.)
I walked past the housing units quietly agog at their subsequent decay. Gregory’s home was full of shoddy and risible electronic gadgets, like Soviet ripostes to Japanese technology – wobbly, shrieking tin openers, a massive toothbrush with a fat-coiled cord left buzzing about on a countertop like a fly in its death throes. Now I saw that his house had been built to the same specifications. These buildings were younger than Naomi Campbell, but looked older than Glen.
When Magnus spoke of ‘a deliberate adherence to the traditions of Scottish building’, what of course he meant was: We’re going to pebble-dash the living shit out of this place, and we’re going to do it really badly. Every knobbled wall facing me was stained and flaky. If these houses had grown out of the ground itself, then the ground itself was a giant mouldy flapjack. Even the bare flanks of the pedestrian underpass I now entered were riddled with structural ailments more complex than concrete cancer: the coarse rash of concrete scabies, the blot of concrete impetigo, the jagged voids of concrete leprosy. When and why did we forget how to make things properly? The rot had literally set in by 1977, when bits of Middlesbrough’s Transporter Bridge that had held firm for seventy years were replaced with sections that would then rust away to nothing in under two decades. We can go back earlier to the Trinity Square car park, semi-condemned by structural decay before it was even finished. Perhaps the most pertinent examples are the two Forth bridges: recent inspections concluded that while the 1890 rail crossing still has a good hundred years in it, cables supporting the 1964 road bridge are corroding at a rate that will render the structure unsafe by 2020. It’ll apparently be cheaper to build a new bridge than attempt the repairs. The sad conclusion is that by 1964 Britain had already lost its self-confidence, the pride and determination to build for a long-term future. As the New Town Committee’s mission statement proves, the heroic vision was still there – tragically, the financial, spiritual and technical wherewithal to realise it were not. The Victorians compulsively over-engineered: they were putting their stamp on the world, and making damn sure that stamp was deep and true and permanent. From the Albert Hall to Cumbernauld.
Even before the whole place started to disintegrate Cumbernauld was struggling to win over potential Glaswegian relocators. In the early 1980s the town’s authorities spread the net wider, launching a national TV campaign catchlined, What’s it called? Cumbernauld! It didn’t work. Cumbernauld is currently home to a busload shy of fifty thousand people, over a third below expectations.
Unburdened with the data, and discounting the several thousand motorists who had come out to spatter my flanks brown, I might have hazarded a significantly lower estimate of the resident population. Three digits would have been pushing it. It had stopped raining, but at 7.30 p.m. on what I realised with a start was a Friday night, I had every underpass and footpath to myself. When at last I did encounter some people, they were all teenagers participating in some miserablist reenactment of Gregory’s Girl: a couple having a huge, sweary row at a bus shelter, another squatting side by side on the wet concrete slabs, both weeping helplessly, a huddled half-dozen grimly sharing a huge bottle of cider in an underpass.
As a hide-and-seek challenge it should have been more haystack than needle, but my quarry proved more cannily elusive than your typical half-mile block of concrete. Only by following the buzz of unseen traffic roaring through its innards did I eventually track it down, through a mid-urban swathe of landscaped greenery that since Gregory’s time had matured into a forest – a dark and lonely forest, full of distant rustling and the dull gleams that helped the town top a nationwide cou
nt of dumped shopping trolleys. This was the Cumbernauld that Irvine Welsh – Irvine Welsh! – called ‘scary’. When at last a massive, shadowy flank of grey took shape through a mantle of trees, it felt like stumbling upon some forgotten citadel of the damned. Here it was: The Megastructure.
‘It’s a little further than we want to go for the programme,’ said presenter Kevin McCloud, at a press conference to introduce that aforementioned C4 series, Demolition. When the producers asked the public to nominate a place they’d like to see given the TNT and JCB treatment, they quickly found their switchboard jammed and inboxes clogged by residents of Scotland’s modernist utopia. ‘We’re asking for individual buildings,’ McCloud told the gathered journalists, ‘but it seems people in Cumbernauld want their entire town to be razed.’
When the poll closed there was a runaway winner, but McCloud and his team felt obliged to distil the Cumbernauld voters’ ground-zero suggestion to a single representative structure. Cumbernauld Town Centre, as The Megastructure is correctly and beguilingly named, was the obvious choice: architectural magazine Urban Realm had just awarded it their annual Carbuncle accolade for ‘Scotland’s Most Dismal Place’, and a year later would do so again. After Demolition was broadcast, many Cumbernauldians stood up for their town with spirited online exonerations, but conspicuously, none could bring themselves to defend the building McCloud had slapped with a virtual anti-preservation order. That task was left to a man called Thomas, who commented: ‘We must keep this 70s masterpiece; we need it to remember Gregory’s Girl!’ Thomas lives in Stockholm.