Dismal is as dismal does

16 Nov 2005

Earlier this year, after a four year gap, Prospect resurrected the Carbuncles, the awards for Scotland’s most dismal town.

The prize, a plook on a plinth, went to Cumbernauld for the second time. The infamous award, which is the outcome of a public vote on Prospect’s website, was given to the Cumbernauld Town Centre an award winning megastructure which, while once visionary, now languishes in a state of semi-dereliction surrounded by wastelands and retail sheds. Prospect was shocked to find that so little progress had been made since the town centre picked up the plook in 2001. The local authority persists with plans to add a new retail complex to the side of the original complex but is struggling to find investors.

Although the award for the Most Dismal Town was handed to Cumbernauld on 17 October, towards the end of December – at the time of press the dates have still to be finalised – Cumbernauld will be the subject of the Channel 4 series Demolition. During the filming of the programme a couple of Scotland’s top architects, Gordon Murray and Gareth Hoskins, were brought together in a workshop hosted by the broadcaster and journalist Janet Street Porter with developer Andrew Burrell, George Ferguson (former president of RIBA), CABE’s deputy chief executive Joanne Averley, two transport specialists and a member of North Lanarkshire Council Planning Department. If the debate generated before this event is even screened is anything to go by then Cumbernauld town centre will not have to wait in neglect for the next Carbuncles Award for more televised infamy.

Thus far, the experience of those involved in the television programme provides a fascinating parallel to our own. For a start, the programme looks set to tacitly support the endeavour behind the original plans of Cumbernauld and focus exclusively on the problems around the town centre. Behind the polemic of Channel 4’s chosen title for the series, Demolition, Oxford Film and Television, which is making the four-part series for Channel 4, was convinced, apparently by Gordon Murray, Past President of RIAS and partner in GM+AD, that the tenor of the workshop should be focused on the re-use of the town centre rather than the destructive process which gives the series its name and drives sensitive architects to distraction.

Behind the headline-grabbing tactics of the series, Demolition has proposed a serious reappraisal of the town based on the knowledge of some industry heavyweights. “Ultimately people have to judge what we do on the basis of what they see. People who jump to conclusions before seeing what we present are missing the point. Demolition should be judged on what it is, rather than what you expect to be. Obviously it is about knocking things down, but it is also about the implications of doing that,” says Nick Kent, executive producer for Demolition and creative director of Oxford Film and Television.

Certainly on paper, the team that Kent brought together to work on the project is impressive. Eschewing the lazy accusation of snobbery, the panel devoted its time to the project in the full knowledge that it could be shafted by an unsympathetic edit. Murray has a clear personal interest in the project, which goes beyond the fact that his practice, was asked to look at the town centre by a developer in 2002. His proposal involved re-use. “In my opinion, in its original form the building was more significant for Scotland’s development than St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross [ranked Number 1 by Prospect in the recent 100 Best Buildings exhibition at the Scottish Design Show]. We looked at why the building was failing, and there were a lot reasons why but architecturally it had a lot to do with Seventies fire regulations, which closed off vistas and shut off galleries. Fire regulations have since become more scientific and it gave us the opportunity to open the whole place up again,” says Murray.

GM+AD examined the megastructure’s history. In the Sixties it contained all the things that a town centre should: council space, social work offices and a library. These had since moved out so they proposal reinvented the town centre as a leisure hub. One of the residents’ repeated complaints, made to us in 2001 and again this year, is that the town centre closes at 5pm. The gm+ad proposals, based on attracting a cinema operator to the core of the town centre and then reinventing the retail around it, failed when a cinema operator could not be tempted to the town.

However, instead of looking solely at the town centre, which many people identified as the major problem in Cumbernauld during our organisation of the Carbuncles, Demolition will look at the centre’s immediate surroundings as well, “from Tesco to Asda” as Murray puts it. The collection of diagrams, proposals and sketches generated by the collective is largely under wraps until the programme’s transmission. Murray however, describes the group’s findings as an attempt to create a grid street pattern in the town centre. “We realised that running east to west you have three main axes, Central Way, which we proposed should be reduced to single lane.” He also proposed two other axes parallel to Central Way, with a third running from the church in the south due north. Joanne Averley, of CABE, made a case that a new master plan for the area should be introduced.

One individual, however, has made up his mind about what Murray calls “the master plan workshop”. David Porch, director of planning and environment with North Lanarkshire Council, completely rejects the design work instigated by Demolition. “The council already has plans for the town centre, developed at considerable expense and with a full knowledge of the design context, development opportunities, site condition and the availability of finance… We will not delay this process any further by producing another master plan at this stage. We will instead press on with continuing investment in the public realm, improvement of leisure facilities and in attempting to complete the next phase of the shopping centre, which we believe to be the main thing which the people of Cumbernauld want,” he says.

Which really would spike the guns of Demolition, and indeed the work of Murray, Gareth Hoskins, Joanne Averley, George Ferguson, Andrew Burrell et al, were it not for the fact that North Lanarkshire Council’s original master plan is having problems. Firstly, the council is having difficulty securing an anchor store for the Antonine Centre for the proposed Phase II of Cumbernauld redevelopment. Developers London and Regional have promised several announcements only for the deadline to lapse with no news. Secondly, according to Gareth Hoskins, there was no sign of a strategy. “We looked at what had occurred around the Town Centre recently and felt that there was no signs of a co-ordinated approach. The Tesco [marked as under construction in the area plan, right] looked as if it had been dropped in randomnly. Piecemeal development cannot continue in a town centre of this size. Joanne Averley from CABE was right to say it needed a masterplan,” he said.

Murray and Hoskin’s belief in the scale and ambition of work runs parallel to concerns in Prospect’s editorial office when it became clear that Cumbernauld would pick up the plinth for a second time. While all of the advisory panel were deeply shocked by the current state of Cumbernauld, there was no consensus on the merits of the original scheme. We hoped that the plook would not be used as a means of damning the ambitious charcater of post-war period redevelopment, particularly Cumbernauld. We recognised that the awards take place against a cultural backdrop in which post-war idealism is seen as the source of failed projects such as Cumbernauld rather than the vicitm of changes in society. However, within the comments that we and the BBC received from the public, councillors were urged to think big in order to solve the problem.

The piecemeal land sales following the demise of Cumbernauld Development Corporation in 1996, hsa eneded with Porch saying, “it\'s important to reiterate that this council doesn\'t own the town centre building”, while simultaneously praying for an anchor store that will provide the keystone for a retail development adjacent to the town centre. The council is clearly confident it will come, given its rejection of an alternative created by top-notch professionals . “Some of the most valuable contributions came from the developers,” says Hoskins.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of Demolition, given North Lanarkshire Council’s testy response that the programme came down behind the proposals of its master plan workshop. Regardless of ideology, to solve the problems created in such an ambitious project, one needs an equally ambitious solution. We certainly feel as if sections of the public have appreciated what we are trying to do. We have since had the Plook on the Plinth taken from us by Bob Johnson, who worked with the Development Corporation, first as works manager and then as head of landscape and environment until it was wound up in 1996. He has his owns plans to hand it to North Lanarkshire Council, “for the Carbuncle that Cumbernauld has become”.