Cumbernauld town centre

Cumbernauld town centre
Cumbernauld town centre, 2006
Location within Scotland
General information
Architectural style	Brutalism
Location	Cumbernauld, Scotland
Current tenants	75 tenants
Construction started	1963
Opened	25 May 1967
Owner	Belgate Estates, Glasgow
Landlord	Gatehouse Property Management, Glasgow
Technical details
Floor count	Eight
Floor area	270,000 sq ft
Design and construction
Architecture firm	Leslie Hugh Wilson, Dudley Roberts Leaker Geoffrey Copcutt, Philip Aitken, Neil Dadge
Main contractor	Cumbernauld Development Corporation
Website
cumbernauldcentre.com/ (archived 9 September 2015)

Cumbernauld town centre is the commercial centre of the new town of Cumbernauld, Scotland. It was designed in the 1950s—as what became known as a megastructure—to be a town centre consisting of "one huge multi-storey building," according to its preliminary planning report, housing shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities.

Phase 1 was completed between 1963 and 1967, and the centre was opened by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden in May 1967. It was expanded in 2007 by the addition of the Antonine Centre, a shopping centre that is linked to the older structure by walkways and lifts.

The facility has been subject to harsh criticism over the years. It was voted "Britain's most hated building" in 2005, in a poll organised by Channel 4's programme Demolition, and was twice named Scotland's worst town centre by the Carbuncle Awards. The top section of the building has been dubbed by writers including author Caro Ramsay as the "Alien's Head", due to local people observing a resemblance to fictional character E.T.

Cumbernauld was designated as a new town in December 1955, part of a plan, under the New Towns Act 1946, to move 550,000 people out of Glasgow and into new towns to solve the city's overcrowding. Construction of its town centre began under contractors Duncan Logan, chief architect Leslie Hugh Wilson and architect Geoffrey Copcutt (until 1962 and 1963), and later Dudley Roberts Leaker, Philip Aitken and Neil Dadge.

Phase 1 lasted from 1963 to 1967. The idea was to create a megastructure, in the brutalist style, to accommodate a town of 50,000–80,000 people, although architecture historian John R. Gold notes that the term megastructure was first coined in 1964. Regarded at the time as a "milestone in urban design," the centre would be surrounded by high-density housing without shops or other amenities, with each neighbourhood connected to the structure by pathways so that residents could easily walk there. Architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt wrote in Harper's in 1965: