CUMBERNAULD’S town centre is to be demolished and replaced, according to North Lanarkshire Council’s plans, after agreeing a deal in principle to purchase the centre from its private owners.
The Herald cites Owen Hatherley’s comments about Cumbernauld in his new book, “Modern Buildings in Britain – A Gazetteer”, where he calls it a “terrible mistake”. The vision was for the town centre to be a long spine of “buildings as constantly growing and morphing organisms,” but what actually happened was “shopping mall developers who didn’t care much for Copcutt’s sculptural Brutalism… inserted various kinds of tat into it before they decided to eat away at the original building, until all that was left was a tatty and gaunt fragment”.
This seems a very difficult time to plan a massive regeneration, given the uncertainty about the future of the British High Street.