‘You still get architects from all over the world coming here,’ said Tom. ‘There’s a Berlin school of architecture that are still very interested in Cumbernauld, they’ve brought students along.’
The central area was not Cumbernauld’s only innovation. Every aspect of the job contained new ideas. This was attested in detail by a thick A4 book Ken Davie pulled from his carrier bag; in it, a former colleague had filled pages and pages with lists of technical firsts. Yet one of the most remarkable innovations was not technical; it was a new way of working. There was, Ken told me, ‘the strong desire to mix all of the professions. So you didn’t have an engineers’ office, an architects’ office, a planning office, we were all mixed in teams with all of these disciplines.’
‘It was very cohesive,’ stressed Tom. ‘There was a great atmosphere in the office. People are still friends. We’ve kept together. There’s a stack of people who came to Cumbernauld to work on the town whose families are still here in the town.’ Was this really different from the nearby comprehensive development areas in Glasgow? Tom was convinced. ‘If you worked in Castlemilk – say you were housing management or an architect – you’d stay in Bearsden or Milngavie or some desirable area and Castlemilk was your job. In Cumbernauld it was part of the life.’
John Knight enjoyed the working conditions too: ‘We were all based in Cumbernauld House, which was wonderful. A William Adam building, sadly in a parlous state now.’ And like Terlings in Harlow, the old house was gradually surrounded by huts, ‘a series of prefab offices that were actually very good. We were all there, everybody was there. The architects, the engineers, the estate side, we were all there together, so you were mixing all the time with these people.’
As John and I sat and chatted, he dropped a bombshell. ‘Where I was so extraordinarily fortunate in the end,’ he said, ‘was that I lived in one of the penthouses that I’d worked on.’ The penthouses sat on top of the megastructure. They were the Bond-villain lairs, the ultimate in postwar futuristic design, the Concorde of twentieth-century town planning. It hadn’t been easy for John to persuade the authorities to grant him one of the flats:. ‘For some reason the housing officers decided they didn’t want me to live there. But eventually the housing manager overruled his staff … it was all very petty. So I selected the one that I wanted to live in, and it was the most exciting house I’ll ever live in. It was fantastic … I had the most fantastic 18 months there.’ This even managed to put my envy of those Span-dwellers I’d met in the shade. It was like talking to someone who’d once owned a Tardis.
‘You went in at a half level,’ he explained, ‘and you went down to the single bedroom and the bathroom, you went up one level to what was an open living area, huge windows facing south, up another half level to a large open kitchen, with windows looking northwards to the hills, and then finally another half-flight took you up to a little roof terrace. And of course, one was young, so could run up and down stairs all day! But the biggest break of all was that we won the Reynolds award, and suddenly we were inundated. We’d always had a good flow of visitors, but suddenly you couldn’t stop them. And not only that, we were getting celebrities. And, of course, they all wanted to see the town centre penthouses. I was living in the show flat!’ John had clearly been in his element. ‘What would happen was someone in housing would ring up and say, “Oh John, we’ve got so-and-so coming, could they visit your penthouse?” … The most, I suppose, important celebrity I had was Prince Claus of the Netherlands. He had a certain notoriety because he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He led a delegation to Cumbernauld and had to see a penthouse. But because he was a semi-crowned head of Europe, I had to leave the house, even though I had the whole place inspected from top to bottom by Strathclyde Police. I had to stand outside my own flat!’ The entire experience sounded bizarre and exciting. ‘Strangely, I was the only development corporation employee who lived in one,’ he said. ‘They were all Glasgow commuters.’
The revelations didn’t end there. It also transpired that John played a role in another of Cumbernauld’s media triumphs: the 1970 film Town for Tomorrow, Cumbernauld Hit’s rather more conventional older brother. ‘Films of Scotland decided to make a film of Cumbernauld,’ explained John. ‘I think the development corporation decided its time was almost up and it needed to be recorded, what had been achieved. It was called Town for Tomorrow. And this starts in the penthouse! With a silly kind of scenario to illustrate how well situated Cumbernauld is for the country. They said, “Well John, the scenario is that we film you in the penthouse” – I was given a token wife at this point, a model called Angela, which was amusing – “and because it’s a lovely day you’re going off for a picnic in the hills. We want to show how Cumbernauld is so wonderfully situated with such gorgeous countryside. So what you do is, she’s making up the picnic in the basket, you’re reading the paper, and you go down and get the car out of the” – well, there weren’t any garages in the town centre, so it had to be filmed somewhere else, me reversing my Spitfire out. And Angela doesn’t come, and Angela doesn’t come, and Angela doesn’t come, and eventually she comes teetering along with her picnic basket and I have to give her a row, you see. It’s all silent, but all this goes on. She says a few rude words to me, dumps the picnic basket in the back and off we drive. And the first bit was to go through the town centre, then do all sorts of exciting things round the interchange, and whizz off northwards. And this was all filmed from helicopter: quite adventurous for the time.’
In keeping with the mood of the times, helicopters featured large in the story of Cumbernauld. ‘Robin [the director] comes out and says, “Disaster.” I said, “I did what you told me!” He said, “Yes, but the problem was, as you drove off, the helicopter banked and the sun just caught the camera, so you’ll have to do it again. And this time you’ll have to drive the wrong way round the interchange.” I said, “WHAT? What if a police car comes up?” He said, “Just do it!” By this time they’d got in the helicopter and taken off. You can see it on the film. I drive the wrong way round the interchange and they reversed the film, so the sun is shining from the north. And amazingly there was no other traffic.’
He sat back demurely and sipped his tea.
Hugh Wilson’s eager young team separated road traffic and pedestrians on a far larger scale than had been achieved before.
‘We planned for the car,’ Tom Reilly confirmed. ‘And therefore we planned for this vehicle/pedestrian separation. That was part of the concept. So that people – the women – could walk to the main shopping centre, any place on that hilltop there. You could walk and you could go through an underpass without crossing a road. Children could walk safely to school.’ In 1967 road traffic figures revealed that Cumbernauld was afflicted with a mere 22 percent of the national average of road accidents, prompting another barrage of positive PR following the recent Reynolds Award win. ‘This staggering reduction in accident figures must largely be due to the segregation of traffic and pedestrians, together with the advanced road design of the town,’ MacGill, the general manager of Cumbernauld development corporation, was quoted as saying in The Times.25 Here, as in Birmingham, the underpass was the hero, sending people underground while cars drove overhead.
However, the planners at Cumbernauld were soon noticing what was to become a universal truth. ‘Women were a bit wary of going down an underpass,’ acknowledged Tom, ‘so when it came to the extension area we didn’t have underpasses. We controlled the speed of the traffic by the shape of the road and had traffic islands at certain places so you could safely cross the road.’ It’s certainly a town of roundabouts, cul-de-sacs and pedestrian bridges, the latter made famous in Gregory’s Girl (‘Do you know that at least twelve tons of cornflakes passes under here every day?’) and now painted a lurid cyan to draw attention to their existence rather than mellowing into the background.
‘People are not sent to new towns,’ remarked the Hook book, ‘they are attracted to them.’26 Copcutt’s view of Cumbe
rnauld was somewhat more prosaic: they ‘were building a cheap town in severe conditions for a lengthening queue of Clydesiders’.27 And with the siting on a bleak, windy ridge, and 80 percent of the future inhabitants coming from Glasgow, mostly from the old tenements, there was no doubt at all about two-thirds of his analysis. But was Cumbernauld building a town on the cheap?
Tom was quite ready to point out the low standard of the build quality of the housing. ‘In Carbrain, you’d three ply felt, timber, a roof joist and then plasterboard, that’s what was actually spent on the roofs of those houses … The windows were minimum windows … Here it’s a very low standard.’ This critique had come quite unprompted, and I was taken aback by such a bleak statement from one of the town’s own architects. ‘We’d to do so much, after the war the problem was so big. People had to take it on and build new homes, new towns quickly. But no one was really saying quality.’
‘I think we built to last,’ interjected Ken. ‘There was no notion that it was a temporary thing. We’re now coming up to some of them that are 40 years old.’ He was at pains to point out some of the more successful and innovative housing built by the corporation: Seafar, for instance, in the north of Cumbernauld, designed by Harry Eccles who went on to work in Warrington and Milton Keynes. ‘These are popular houses,’ he said, tapping a drawing of a Seafar house in a book. ‘They are very innovative in that you go down to the bedrooms and up to the living accommodation. They’re upside down, so you had views over the top.’ Yet despite all of the new thinking on layouts, roads and the town centre, most of Cumbernauld’s new housing was surprisingly traditional for a place that has such a radical reputation.
‘They looked at traditional Scottish construction,’ explained Tom, ‘low density roughcast, and the colours, and everyone worked to the same kind of pattern. You didn’t as an architect go in and say, “We’re going to have a red roof here and a green roof there.”’
‘Perhaps they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, the initial ones,’ admits Ken, ‘but it was an attempt to establish Cumbernauld as a desirable place to invest a lot of private housing money, and that did happen.’
Like the central area, Seafar won awards for design, and is considered by some ‘Scotland’s most significant ensemble of postwar urban architecture and planning’.28 In the words of planner Lionel Brett, it is ‘drily described by the Scots as “popular with architects”’.29
Later, my friend Kirsten and I drove around streets that the sixties Housing Minister Richard Crossman had described as having homes of ‘a tremendously austere, exhilarating, uncomfortable style’.30 The big shock after the megastructure was just how unshocking these areas were. Cars and pedestrians had been separated by that most traditional of materials: cobbles. With the pale grey roughcast everywhere, the small, cottagey houses, the steep hilly landscape and gulls screaming overhead, I kept expecting to see the sea round the next corner. No wonder Sir Robert Grieve, then Chief Planning Officer at the Scottish Office, described it as looking ‘like the little fishing village … tight, against the wind’.31 Long, low ‘pram steps’ were crumbling everywhere, a hangover from the days when the average age of a Cumbernauld inhabitant was mid-twenties and starting a family. The fabric of the place – Abronhill, Kildrum, especially Carbrain – was falling apart. Many of the kerbs, steps, roads and pavements were subsiding, wonky and in need of replacement. People had tarted up their houses and many of those seemed to be holding up, but the communal spaces had suffered since the winding up of the development corporation in 1996.
Back in the sixties, people began moving into these houses while construction work on the town was still going on.
‘The early pioneers had to suffer a lot,’ said Ken, echoing the experience of everyone I’d met in Harlow. ‘It was the muddiest town in the world. It was pretty hard going.’
‘The first thing I did,’ recalled Janice Scott Lodge, a Cumbernauld resident writing in the Guardian’s women’s page in 1965, ‘was step out of my car and flat in the mud.’ And while the mud haunted her, invading her home, she found that ‘the only place it never seemed to encroach was our garden, which appeared to consist of solid concrete and resisted every attack made on it.’32 The comprehensive nature of the development in an area like Kildrum meant that early residents were plonked in an entirely new district, with amenities so new that no one knew how to work them, and left to get on with it. At the time Janice pointed out the poor transport connections to nearby towns, noting that owning a car was essential, and that the local shops traded on their monopoly by charging way over the going rate for goods and services. ‘Most of these drawbacks should disappear,’ she remarked, ‘but at the moment they cause so much frustration, even real hardship, that many newcomers are disheartened and return to the cities at the first opportunity.’
The cobbles of Kildrum.
The roughcast houses on the steep slope ‘like the little fishing village … tight, against the wind.’
Journalist Sheila Black found plenty of these discombobulated new residents when she visited for the Financial Times in 1967: ‘“It’s lonely,” says one. “It’s dull.” “I want to go back to what they called the slums.”’33 As these newcomers left, and the builders moved onto the next muddy bit to start all over again, hardy souls like Janice remained to tough it out. She described those that remained as ‘a vigorous, farsighted nucleus, who are prepared to lift their eyes from the mud to see the stars’. A survey sponsored by the development corporation in 1968 revealed that ‘74.6 percent of the respondents claimed they had bettered themselves by going to Cumbernauld’ with ‘better housing’ emerging as the most popular reason for the claim.34
‘There was a tremendous sense of community in the early days,’ said Ken, and Janice’s experience seemed to bear this out: ‘Life is difficult, certainly, without the amenities our standards have led us to expect – but life is fun,’ she wrote. ‘It has challenge and a purpose.’
‘And not everyone got in,’ Tom reminded us. ‘The housing department would actually go out and see people in their homes. Interview people.’ My friend Kirsten’s family was one of those interviewed, and they passed the test. Having spent much of our trip lamenting the current state of the town, she began to recall those early days with great fondness – much to her surprise.
‘I lived in Cumbernauld between ’78 and ’83,’ she said. ‘The great thing about Abronhill, which I think was replicated everywhere else, was the play areas. Obviously the kids would congregate, so the parents would come to find them and speak to each other, and the relationships really started to build. It was a fantastic place. The branding of Cumbernauld was brilliant for the residents. I’m a Cumbernauld Kid – and I was! You could have cut me in two and it would have said Cumbernauld all the way through.’
Back in 1965, Janice Scott Lodge had found that making new friends on the estate wasn’t quite so easy for all the new residents, reporting that ‘the planners and architects of the new town have heavily accented privacy in their housing designs, perhaps too much so. The result is houses whose windows overlook none of their neighbours, or, in the instance of my present home which is built around an individual courtyard, no outer windows at all.’35 Yet the residents interviewed by sociologist Peter Willmott painted a much more complex picture than the press. ‘I think the houses are too close together,’ said a housewife in Carbrain, ‘but surprisingly enough it’s very, very private. It’s been very cleverly done. None of our windows look into other people’s.’36 Nevertheless, the sheer proximity of the homes meant that privacy could easily be compromised: ‘When you walk along the path, you’re conscious you can see in,’ said a housewife in Kildrum. ‘I feel sometimes that I’ve no right to be there. You feel guilty because you can’t help looking in.’37
Houses in Abronhill, where Kirsten grew up.
The critic Ian Nairn wasn’t convinced by talk of the uniqueness of Cumbernauld. To him it was ‘simply the old kind [of new town] moved closer together.’ He discer
ned three main faults in the design: the vehicle/pedestrian separation had been overdone; the pedestrian paths simply followed ‘the pattern of the industrial revolution slum with its street and back lane, given a modern architectural dress’; and there was a woeful lack of protection from the elements around the central area.38 He ended his critique on an ominous note – that Cumbernauld had to have been built to stop similar mistakes being made elsewhere. Perhaps after all Hook had had a lucky escape.
Tom had a different perpective. ‘You felt as if you were really doing good, it was better than being in politics. If you wanted to do good in politics you had far more power if you worked in a development corporation because you were providing people with new housing. The pleasure of a woman coming out to see a brand new house and handing it over was fantastic. If you were spending money that was a good way to spend it.’
And Ken agreed: ‘We felt that this was a good place to live, a good place that we’ve created.’
Notes
1 Mary Stott, ‘New Town Life in Scotland’, Guardian, 8 October 1965, p10
2 Geoffrey Copcutt in Rebuilding Scotland edited by Miles Glendinning, Tuckwell Press, 1997, p92
3 Geoffrey Copcutt in Architectural Design, May 1963, p210-11
4 Geoffrey Copcutt in Glendinning, p89-90
5 Geoffrey Copcutt in Architectural Design, May 1963, p210-11
6 ‘Concept of New Town “In Advance of Any Yet”’, The Times, 30 November 1962, p8
7 Frank Schaffer, The New Town Story, Paladin, 1972, p142-3
8 Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume 1, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1975, p159
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