Scots Plea For Architectural Mercy Killing

“When the makers of a new Channel 4 series on Britain’s ugliest buildings invited viewers to nominate the eyesore they would most like to see demolished they were hardly prepared for a request to flatten an entire town. But civic pride appears to be truly dead and buried in Cumbernauld, a 1950s creation that is home to 52,000 souls 15 miles northeast of Glasgow. Its residents were among the first to contact the programme, begging for dynamite and bulldozer to deliver them oblivion.” The town’s design won architectural awards in the brutalist-besotted 1970s, but the 2003 “Idler’s Book of Crap Towns” called Cumbernauld the second-worst place to live in the UK.