Concretopia
Page 30
‘There were four of us working on phase two,’ said John Knight.
‘The problem was that Copcutt had established the grid for the first phase, because it all had to be modular and gridded right the way across … There were two floors of car parking that had to be built before you even started. And that was its final undoing, because no developer said, “I’m willing to to stump up for two floors of car parking that I have no control over.” And on top of that I had to fit entertainment buildings into this grid. Of course it didn’t work. I fell out with Doug Stonelake who was the group leader, because he said, “You Have Got To Work To The Grid.” And I said, “This is a nonsense Doug. You can’t have a cinema with columns coming up the middle of it.” It was as stupid as that. I said, “The grid’s got to blossom into the areas you need for a dance hall, a skating rink, etc.” We never saw eye to eye on that. In fact, we talked about it a fortnight ago and he said, “I really gave you a bad time.” I remember one day he came with a sheet of tracing paper – I’d designed a nice cinema – and he just spread this sheet of tracing paper over the top and drew these heavy lines right across. The grid!’
‘Whether mothers will take kindly to pushing prams up the long ramps.’ © North Lanarkshire Archives (ref: UT/178/1/171)
‘The trouble was,’ said Tom, ‘it was multi-storey but it wasn’t enclosed. It was open.’ I looked again at the drawings and realised that the folk staring down from walkways outside the shops at the cars below weren’t behind glass, but leaning on open balconies. It seems incredible that such a huge structure, built on an exposed Scottish ridge, with a shopping centre at its heart, was designed to be open to the elements. Tom shook his head in bewilderment at Copcutt’s apparent oversight. ‘The wind came in at one end. Modern shopping centres after this were enclosed and centrally heated and warm. If this had continued and had been enclosed properly and had been heated it would have made a difference.’
In Edinburgh, John Knight was equally nonplussed:
‘There’s no way you could have a tunnel shopping street in the highest hilltop town in Scotland short of Dalwhinnie, and people would want to shop in it. It was all raw concrete because everybody thought that was the thing to do at the time. And, of course, they couldn’t get shops, that was the other big problem. There was a temporary shopping centre at Muirhead which had started off as temporary buildings but had got a supermarket and whatever, but none of them wanted to move into this megastructure because it was going to cost them so much money to fit out the units. But some of the photographs from when it was first built … It does look pretty good. That wonderful dog-leg ramp thing that comes up from the south. Nothing was ever worked out for either end of it, of that I’m pretty sure.’
So hard was it to let shops on the upper floors of the centre – a problem familiar to developers at the Elephant and Castle – the decision was taken that they would have to abandon planning for these decks, and go back to developing on the ground. ‘So what you got was escalators taking you down to the ground,’ said John, ‘a total admission of failure.’
It turned out that the wind whistling through the centre was not the only serious problem. Many other issues stemmed from the futuristic ambitions of its designer coming up against the corner-cutting workmanship of the day. Water penetrated the concrete and some seriously shoddy finishes were built by the soon bankrupted building contractor, who, outrageously, entirely failed to leave records of the infrastructure buried beneath the concrete. Copcutt’s vision of an endlessly flexible construction proved illusory, as later architects and developers found their plans for additions to the largely unrealised central area thwarted by the structure’s intransigence: like a spoilt child it stubbornly refused to play nicely with the other developments. In the end the much-vaunted ‘megastructure’ existed largely in the minds of a handful of architectural critics and academics, with the central area never reaching a size that merited the name.ii
‘The thing that annoys me,’ says Ken, ‘is that there were problems with the town centre, but very often it’s Cumbernauld as a whole that gets the criticism, whereas there’s a whole lot of excellent housing. There was a series of programmes, Channel 4 was it?’ He mimes teeth. Janet Street-Porter, I say – the show in question being 2005’s Demolition, a week-long series where the public were asked to nominate buildings they wanted demolished. ‘There was one shot of her on Central Way [the A80] saying “I don’t know how to get into the town centre.” Now, of course, she should never have been there.’
‘Because of the pedestrian separation,’ nods Tom grimly, referring to one of the basic tenets of the town, that wherever possible cars and pedestrians should be completely separated.
‘These sort of things stuck in the throat a wee bit,’ says Ken, who had been a paragon of gentle tolerance for the rest of our conversation. And it’s hard not to agree that this sort of willful misrepresentation didn’t help anyone. ‘It’s easy to criticise the town centre but it did provide innovation for a lot of things. Parking your car underneath and going up, which is quite normal in many shopping centres now, was frowned upon initially.’ Later I discovered a clipping from The Times in 1972, a decade after Copcutt’s plans were revealed to the press, where a journalist got Ken to admit that with hindsight, he would have designed the town centre rather differently.9 This enormous building must have been rather a millstone for him all these years. Architecture critic Ian Nairn gave a ‘half term’ report on the centre in 1967, declaring that the one fifth of Copcutt’s design so far built was ‘worthy but leaden, with none of the high spirits of schemes like the Tricorn at Portsmouth’.10
‘I keep saying to people who pass judgement on Cumbernauld,’ said Tom patiently, ‘that you’ve got to go back to the time it was designated and what was happening in the world and the UK at that time. You’re talking 50 years ago. Things were quite different, car ownership was quite different. There were virtually no supermarkets at all, and in the town centre Cumbernauld had the second largest one in Scotland – now disappeared.’
‘But now they’ve sold the whole central area to private development,’ he said, a note of quiet outrage in his voice, ‘which means a development company owns all of the land there. So it means if you come to build a new office block in Cumbernauld there’s no public land, you’ll need to go to the developer there to get ground. Before it was all planned, but now it’s all handed to the developer.’
This warning didn’t serve to lessen the shock of actually visiting the central area itself. I don’t know what I’d expected to see: a decaying hulk of concrete isolated on barren land between two huge road interchanges, perhaps. Something vast and tragic, for sure; the crumbling wreck of a crashed spaceship on the rugged Scottish hilltop. Instead, the central area has all but vanished. A huge section of phase one and all of phase three were demolished in the nineties, and a new shopping centre, the Antonine, has been tacked onto the side of the remains of the old one, like a parasitic plant strangling its host. In turn, a vast Tesco shed buts up against the Antonine Centre. Ground level car parks have replaced the internal ones from the original design. The penthouses (once optimistically referred to as the ‘sun deck’) can still be discerned from a distance, their black spine the only original feature still visible. Ironically, the whole central area now resembles an out-of-town shopping precinct rather than the centre of anything; from one of the most recognisable places in Scotland it’s been converted into a non-place.11 It’s only when driving on the road that cuts through what’s left of the centre that the original structure reveals itself. A valley is formed by irregular concrete walls stained with algae that rise above on either side, and rusting pedestrian bridges decay high above the road. This is where all the ducts, vents, service entrances and loading bays front onto the road. Here security guards stand around puffing cigarettes by back doors, IT professionals park up with new components for old retail equipment, and reps hurriedly eat sandwiches in their cars between appointments.
The remaining section of Geoffrey Copcutt’s Central Area megastructure, seen from the road that passes through it.
Inside the Antonine Centre are vast walls of crisp matt white, giving it an unfinished nineties air. The minimalism attempts to counteract the complex arrangement of escalators, stairs and levels leading off from it. When we eventually reached the old central area shopping levels high above, it was clear that almost all of the shops have long-since closed, including a beautiful wooden-clad bookshop called Span. A few ancient cafés and opticians shops still cling to life, but the gleaming decks illustrated in Mike Evans’ line drawings have become shabby and dark. Copcutt had been saddened that the finished structure had been shorn of so many of the features he’d intended, such as ‘the mosaic of sites’ he had intended for flea markets, as well as ‘countless minor delights’ that were ‘not so much “simplified” as simply missed’. Now time has cruelly granted him his wish: the entire centre feels like a flea market. Consequently, it has that quality that designers try so hard to build into environments, but which only grows over time: it has developed character. The lack of chain stores, the irregularly shaped paths between the shops, the brown and orange wall tiles, the internal ramps – they all give the place a quirky, independent feel, especially when placed next to the apologetic blankness of the Antonine Centre.
Very little of Copcutt’s design was built as intended, yet odd glimpses remain: the long slopes and staircases tucked away from the shops; the walls of stained net glass that look out at the penthouses, pedestrian bridges and flat roofs of the remaining structure. They are reminders, however imperfect, of Evans’ pristine line drawings from 50 years ago, ghostly sightings of the space age we’ve consigned to history.
The drawings are not the only ghosts that haunt Cumbernauld. There’s also Hook.
From the Hook book, the layout of the central area of the town that was never built.
Planned in the mid-fifties by the London County Council as a private scheme rather than an official government-sponsored new town, Hook was meant to create urgent housing for 100,000 people, mostly former Londoners. After much scouring of land around the capital they chose to site the town in fields around Hook, a village in rural Hampshire between Basingstoke and Farnborough. Chief planner Oliver Cox and team churned through detailed reports on everything from suitable industries for the town (a propelling pencil factory was among the proposals) to the number of homes that would be needed for an average family of 3.2 people 50 years after the completion of building work. Delegations were sent to study the other new towns, particularly cutting-edge Cumbernauld, and the planners set to work designing future-proof housing schemes, shopping centres and road networks.
In an audacious move, Cox employed his very own visionary to rival Copcutt: Graeme Shankland, a young and controversial London County Council planner who had got into all sorts of trouble as a leading light in yet another modernist splinter group – this one called SP UR. The Society for Promotion of Urban Renewal had frightened the residents of Boston Manor in London when the BBC showed their plan to demolish the entire district and rebuild it as a futuristic landscape of towers and walkways. Several prominent members of SP UR went on to design the Barbican. Yet Cox was adamant that Shankland, despite his bad boy reputation, was the man for Hook, refusing to take on the job without him.12
After a year’s work by Cox and his team, the authorities decided that it would be quicker and cheaper to expand the nearby towns of Basingstoke and Aldershot, and the Hook scheme was abandoned. Yet although the town was not built, the team’s work was not altogether in vain: they produced an extraordinary book, The Planning of a New Town, which detailed exactly what it was they had planned, and why. Given its technical subject matter, large format and pages of dazzling stats, The Hook Book, as it became known, was not an obvious bestseller, but it became a surprise worldwide hit.iii Oliver Cox later speculated that ‘one reason why the Hook book was the only bestseller that the LCC ever produced is that it did contain a summary of what we found interesting in the other new towns that were being built.’13
The Hook Book is a wonderful snapshot of an optimistic moment in British history, with the planners rightly seeing themselves at an important crossroads in modern history. ‘Ten years ago there was a shortage of consumer goods and many items, including petrol, were rationed,’ they noted, pointing out the decline in cinema attendance and the rise in television viewing as important signs of the way in which family life was evolving in the postwar world.14 Their solutions were state-of-the-art for 1960. First, there was the urgent need to separate pedestrians and cars. Hook’s planners predicted that in the future most families would own more than one car, and designed the central area to cope with 8,150 vehicles under the pedestrian platform level at any one time. At the same time, they maintained that, ‘the whole system should be designed to encourage pedestrian movement and so reduce or obviate the need to use cars for as many journeys as possible.’15 The footpaths, away from the road network, ‘would form a new kind of town “street”. They would become the focus of activity and outdoor social life.’16 Naturally, as a town of the future, Hook was to have its own heliport ‘designed to meet the requirements of an inter-city service’.17
Like Cumbernauld, Hook would have a vast central area: a mile-long platform suspended 20 feet off the ground from which buildings would sprout above and below, as if from a huge hyacinth vase. With cars, buses and lorries segregated beneath the deck and pedestrians happily shopping, socialising and working above, this would form a gigantic megastructure at the heart of the town. The tight site would mean that the houses would need to be built much more closely together than in previous new towns, with the Hook plan envisioning flats built right next to the central area, and smaller houses on the outskirts. A network of raised walkways through the residential areas would bring pedestrians effortlessly up to the deck of the central area rather than to the subterranean world of car parks, roads and industrial hoists below. ‘At last, we were to see an English new town which had shaken off the dead hand of the Garden City formula,’ wrote Edward Carter, then head of the Architectural Association.18 Like Cumbernauld, this was a town that promised to be the fulfillment of the postwar modernist dream on all fronts, not only in its wealth of innovative details but in its conceptual audacity.
The Hook team acknowledged their debt to Cumbernauld, but they were also critical of their Scottish counterpart. Their central area had been carefully sited in a valley so that the raised pedestrian deck could sit ‘like a lid’, in contrast to Cumbernauld’s rearing conspicuousness on the crest of the hill. ‘Such a site would save excavation for roads and car parks needed at the lower level, and would enable pedestrians to walk down or along into it instead of having to walk upwards as would happen with location on a hill-top site.’19 ‘We were right about that’ maintained Oliver Cox in a later interview, remarking that ‘taking a centre and placing it on top of a hill was totally wrong.’20
In fact, an alternative site for Cumbernauld’s central area had been proposed: at the foot of the hill where the train station now sits. ‘Tests on the traffic showed this wasn’t feasible,’ said Ken, still sensitive to the Hook team’s accusations. But when Copcutt’s scheme became a notorious wind tunnel, it became increasingly hard to ignore the predictions of the Hook planners that ‘retailing trends in the future are likely to favour enclosed, centrally-heated and serviced shopping centres.’
The Hook team’s criticisms were forgotten when a delegation from the American Institute of Architects visited Cumbernauld in 1967 as they scoped out potential entries for the R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award for community architecture.
‘To our amazement we were on the shortlist with Stockholm and Tapiola,’ said Ken, his delight still plain to see for all his efforts to conceal it, ‘and we then won!’ The award was announced in Washington on 10 May 1967, the Financial Times reporting that the jury chose it as ‘the western world’s highest achievement in new urban design
for modern human needs’. A month later at the award ceremony in Scotland, Richard Reynolds, whose metals business sponsored the prize, claimed that ‘Cumbernauld has set the standard for the world … some of the most expensive buildings in the history of architecture have been the ugliest. In Cumbernauld you have, to your credit, combined outstanding design with reasonable cost.’21 It was the biggest international prize given to any of the new towns.
‘It meant a lot to the prestige of the town, there’s no doubt about that,’ confirmed Ken. Even Bison, the contractor who built Cumbernauld’s eight 11-storey tower blocks in a record 15 weeks, placed adverts in the national press congratulating the team on the award – and proudly boasting that ‘much of Cumbernauld is being built with Bison wall frame’ because of ‘its smooth-working industrialised building system.’22
More recent prizes have been less kind: Cumbernauld’s town centre topped Channel 4’s Demolition poll in 2005, and came second in the 2003 edition of The Idler’s Crap Towns vote, with many agreeing heartily with New Society journalist Nicholas Taylor’s 1973 description of the building as a ‘dirty, windy megalith of piled-up shopping ledges’.23 Of course, fans of visionary modern architecture see it quite differently: Miles Glendinning describes it as ‘one of the key monuments of postwar European architecture, and the most important postwar work in this country’.24