Cumbernauld Town Centre

Cumbernauld

Authority: North Lanarkshire

Proposal: Supporting HES in their Assessment to List Services: Heritage Services, COINTL

Status: Decision Not to List Confirmed

In March 2022, Historic Environment Scotland (HES) announced that they were to undertake an assessment of Cumbernauld Town Centre to establish if it met the criteria for listing. Iceni Built Heritage & Townscape Scotland were commissioned by the owners of the Town Centre to produce a report to assist HES in their assessment of the site by presenting as much relevant information as possible for consideration about the building. Along side the report a Certificate Of Intention Not To List (COINTL) was also submitted due to the findings of the report.

Cumbernauld Town Centre is a notorious site and is deemed as one of Britain’s most hated buildings by most but loved as academic exercise in town planning and post-war design by some. The findings of our research was that the Town Centre had huge amounts of significance due to its individuality. It broke away from the Garden City format of post-war town planning and experimented with a clustered layout and the Town Centre as a megastructure in the middle. Its design was New Brutalism and included a number of innovations such as segregated pedestrians from traffic throughout the entire new town.

The report also found that everything that had made the Town Centre significant was now lost due many alterations and developments following the original design. These developments happened partly due to bad decisions regarding the Town Centre’s development but also because the original design was fundamentally flawed in a number of ways. The result was that Town Centre became a jumbled mess of tacked-on corridors and halls with badly executed safety updates and neglected areas of maintenance and repairs.

HES decided not to list the Town Centre and issued a Certificate of Intention not to List (COINTL) for part of the Town Centre.