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Cumbernauld, Cumbernauld Town Centre, General
Bus Station (Modern), Flat(S) (19th Century) - (20th Century), Municipal Building (19th Century) - (20th Century), Shopping Centre (20th Century)
Site Name Cumbernauld, Cumbernauld Town Centre, General
Classification Bus Station (Modern), Flat(S) (19th Century) - (20th Century), Municipal Building (19th Century) - (20th Century), Shopping Centre (20th Century)
Alternative Name(s) Town Centre
Canmore ID 70557
Site Number NS77SE 47
NGR NS 75805 74489
NGR Description Centred on NS 75805 74489
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/70557
First 100 images shown. See the Collections panel (below) for a link to all digital images.
- Council North Lanarkshire
- Parish Cumbernauld
- Former Region Strathclyde
- Former District Cumbernauld And Kilsyth
- Former County Dunbartonshire
Built from the 1960s, Cumbernauld New Town accommodated 70,000 residents in dense low-rise housing and tower blocks. The Town Centre, a huge concrete 'megastructure', was designed to hold Cumbernauld's retail, administrative, cultural and recreational facilities on nine levels, accessed via an on-site bus station and a motorway running underneath. The bold architecture of the Town Centre received international acclaim.
Information from RCAHMS (SC) 17 August 2007
Glendinning, M, MacInnes, R and MacKechnie, A, 1996
NS77SE 47 centred on NS 75805 74489
Construction (1960)
Photographic Survey (1990)
Publication Account (1997)
A massive multi-level, multi-function town-centre building set on an elevated ridge, straddling a dual-carriageway through road. One of the key monuments of postwar European architecture, and the most important postwar work in this country. Significant chiefly as the international exemplar of 'megastructural' planning - the conception, central to avant-garde 1950s/60s architecture, of single, agglomerative buildings containing multiple functions juxtaposed in a visually exciting manner with traffic routes. In a postwar context, the Centre is almost completely original as a conception - although possibly influenced, further back, by the multi-level imagery of Italian Futurism, or by Schindler's Lovell Beach House - and it was hailed by International Modern Movement historian Reyner Banham as 'the canonical megastructure'. More prosaically: it ws the world's first multi-level covered-in town centre. (Figs. 4.45, 4.46).
Information from 'Rebuilding Scotland: The Postwar Vision, 1945-75', (1997).
