Cumbernauld: Scotland’s Model New Town

In its prime, Cumbernauld New Town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, was one of most celebrated examples of 1960s urbanism. Unlike its English predecessors—such as Stevenage and Harlow—which sought to recreate the green arcadia of the garden suburb, Cumbernauld was explicitly modernist in its ambitions. Set on a hill site—not an obvious choice in the context of the Scottish weather—Cumbernauld’s designers sought to create a compact, powerfully three-dimensional city centre surrounded by neighbourhood units. The goal was to make a town in which the incoming population, drawn from Glasgow tenement housing, would feel at home. As the Architects’ Journal reported in January 1968: “The unique idea of the centre was to place, within one single, complicated structure, all the major social, commercial and shopping functions of the town.” This futuristic city centre straddles an urban motorway, which is linked to a formally composed network of distributor and feeder roads. Such was the initial impact of Cumbernauld that in 1967 it attracted some 10,000 official visitors from sixty countries and won the prestigious R. S. Reynolds Award for Community Architecture of the American Institute of Architects in competition with Vällingby (Stockholm) and Tapiola (Espoo, Finland). As the AAI jury noted, “The Town Centre and the roadway system, the heart and circulation system of Cumbernauld, bring together the urban environment and the automobile into a powerful resolution.” Sadly, the dreams of the city of the future were short-lived, and Cumbernauld was already in decline by the mid-1970s. This chapter traces the rise and fall of a brave but doomed utopia.