Cumbernauld

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Cumbernauld is a new town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, created in 1956 as a population overflow for Glasgow. Its population was 49,664 at the time of the 2001 census. The name comes from the Scots Gaelic comar nan allt, meaning the meeting of the waters.

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History

Its history stretches to Roman times, with a settlement near the Antonine Wall. A rural population grew in the area where Cumbernauld's housing estates now stand, with the centrepoints being Cumbernauld House (near the site of Cumbernauld Castle) and Cumbernauld Village nearby. A mining and quarrying industry flourished after the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal, notably at Auchinstarry Quarry which is now a popular location for climbing and abseiling.

Cumbernauld sits on top of one of the highest hills in the low-lying Scottish central belt. This has given it its old Scot's nomen, 'the windy toun'. It was long a staging-post for changing horses between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Spur Inn in the village still has the archway for the stagecoaches.

After the creation of the new town, diverse industries such as high-tech, electronics, and chemical and food processing became large employers, along with the UK government tax collection office, the Inland Revenue.

During its construction beginning 1959?, under the designer's eye of Geoffrey Copcutt, Cumbernauld's town centre's daring megastructure architecture was highly praised. Architects, designers, town planners and students of many disciplines visited Cumbernauld from around the globe to marvel at the town, for many years heralded as a utopian construction.

Since then, the outlook has changed dramatically and the New Town has won a number of very unflattering awards including the "Plook on a Plinth" in both 2001 and 2005. In December 2005 the entire Town Centre won a public nomination for demolition in the Channel 4 series Demolition in 2005. As well as a widespread backlash against modernist architectural taste, the passage of time has exposed serious defects in post-war concepts of centrally planned retail and civic centres developed in the absence of proper community consultation or sensitivity to local environmental and economic conditions. The Town Centre is widely regarded as one of the ugliest and least-loved examples of post war design in Scotland. However, the common confusion of the dysfunctional and unattractive Town Centre with the town of Cumbernauld itself is an abiding source of frustration for residents, many of whom are the descendents of skilled workers who aspired to escape the frequently appalling social and housing conditions of the Glasgow connurbation in the 1960s and 70s. That the deleterious effects of Scotland's de-industrialisation have compromised some of Cumbernauld's original ideals should not eclipse the achievements of the town or its inhabitants in building, over some fifty years, strong communities and neighbourhoods and in sustaining a strikingly distinctive ecology of housing, transport and countryside from which generations of people have benfited.

The supposed core of Cumbernauld remains the "Town Centre", all of which is essentially contained within one structure, segmented into "phases", the first of which was completed in 1967, the latest of which began construction in May 2003 for completion around September 2004. Designed to be a commerce centre, an entertainment and business venue and a luxury accommodation site, it was widely accepted as the UK's first shopping mall and was the world's first multi-level covered town centre. But the town never developed to its planned size, and the town centre has never had the life envisaged by town planners. Wealthy occupiers for the centre's penthouses never materialised and some now lie empty and derelict. Further expansion has been primarily to provide further space for shops. A substantial portion of the Town Centre has been bulldozed to make way for a new shopping and leisure complex cloned from the many other identical retail estates that now litter the United Kingdom.

The residential structure of Cumbernauld is noteworthy in that there were no pedestrian crossings, i.e. zebra or pelican crossings, or traffic lights until a set of traffic / pelican lights were erected beside the new Tesco Extra, opened January 2004—pedestrians traverse roads by bridge or underpass. A previous editor of this article noted that the town is infamously difficult to navigate by foot, having been designed for a world where the car was assumed to be king, but another point of view suggests that many inhabitants of Cumbernauld value the efficient and quiet network of footpaths and the ready access they afford to civic amenities and a rich and diverse surrrounding contryside.

The town has a reputation as grim and isolating, but this perception derives from undue concentration on social and economic problems Cumbernauld shares with much of the Central Lowlands and ignores a great deal that is appealing about living in the town. In consequence, Cumbernauld is in the bizarre position of having above average income and below average unemployment and child poverty rates, yet also below average house prices for the region. However, the town's housing is well planned and generally of high quality, making it a source of local civic pride in stark contrast to the town centre megastructure. Houseprice imbalances across Central Scotland mean that large family homes of 4 bedrooms and above are available for occupancy in Cumbernauld at prices and rents often half that of equivalent or less salubrious dwellings in the nearby centres of Glasgow and Stirling. The potential locked in Cumbernauld remains as great as it was in the 1960s, requiring only imagination and leadership from local and national political elites to release it.

Cumbernauld, or more specifically the suburb Abronhill, was the location for the film Gregory's Girl and its sequel, Gregory's Two Girls.

Cumbernauld is twinned with the town of Bron, France. The local football teams are Clyde, based at Broadwood Stadium and Cumbernauld United, based at Guy's Meadow. The local rugby team is Cumbernauld RFC. Nearby motorway links include the M8, M73, M74, M80 and M9. Ongoing construction work to provide additional housing and retail opportunities are located in the north-east of the town, with major upgrading of the A80 dual carriageway to improve transportation links within the town. A local campaign was recently initiated to protest at the proposed extension of the M80 within the town limits.

There is a minor airfield located in Cumbernauld (EGPG). It is used primarily for pilot training by a company based at the airfield. On the 21 December 2005 a helicopter flying from the airfield crashed near Perthshire. The chopper was bound for a heliport in Aberdeen. The cause of the crash is still a mystery.

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