"People like report -type reports , don’t they? It’s better than real life."

After 30 years hard labour Cumbernauld was in fact in retrospect a joy.
You stir a rush of thoughts. I’m sitting in a pair of shorts, arm-wrestling mosquitoes.
Cumbernauld to me was an obsession in a family setting. Hugh the father. Didn’t you and I arrive the same day and we tossed up for housing or the centre?
By heaven I must have been hard to work with."

correspondence between Geoff Copcutt and Derek Lyddon, 1995

Cumbernauld New Town Centre in retrospect
Geoffrey Copcutt (1995 paper)

In the Beginning
Arm-wrestling Third World bugs 8000 miles East of those cool Cumbernauld slopes, I keenly recall returning from an early exploration to fold a single sheet of paper into a form which gathered dimensions the Queen would come to baptise, and Prince Philip to blitz as "bloody concrete."
We were building a cheap town in severe conditions for a lengthening queue of Clydesiders. I never doubted the logic of a central infrastructure of highways and walkways, layers and ledges promising shelter, warmth and family freedom.
The Future Unfolds
The paper prototype passed from passion to obsession. Hugh Wilson the father kept the faith. Deputy Dudley Leaker kept the peace. In the end, both had to decide to do a caesarian, to get the drawings out of me and up to the excavations.
The paradox of an open citadel was too commanding to risk compromise. So with colleague Alex Kerr, I shamelessly did night classes poaching statistics and traffic planning. By day we engaged rowdy academics on a 100-towns retail-social study, and spent weekends recording the wind regime and sampling test bores. In between, we debated income and spending patterns, projected travel modes, deliveries and solid waste values, juggled structural grids to match parking modules, mitigated venturi effects and correlated tenant, corner shop, and sub-centre distribution to match the first phase.
And all the while, like a jeweller fashioning precious metal, I hammered the cross-sections and shaped landscape, to form an urban morphology.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen
With the succession of roles came a succession of contributions, evidenced in the footprint of Alex Kerr and the fingerprints of Dave Brindle, in the texts of Alan McCullough and the context of Kilspindie. This fraternal gallery frames professors Hendry (physics, Liverpool), Diamond (economics, Glasgow), and Broady (sociology, ditto). Over the mantelpiece hangs John Faber, son of Oscar the engineer. Without his fun and flair, even the filleted version of the first phase might have never been built.
Perhaps infected by the interest of Scottish Development Department guru Bob Grieve, our own administrators took 'air rights' in their stride; schooled in municipal halls, they found themselves assembling take-apart models like born-again believers. Every accent, including echoes of the legions of Antonius, was heard as a band of luminaries from Pier Luigi Nervi, Roma, to Lewis Mumford, Flushing, brought their harps to the studio. They came to witness the evolution of a nine-level package accomodating most of the commercial, civic, cultural, and recreational uses for a population of 70,000, elevated over a vehicular system linked to radials a mile apart. Occupying 150 acres of the ridge and upper south slope between interchanges, its organisation was to be justified by exposure, topography, flexibility of functions, pedestrian separation and the need for vehicle discipline.
Cold Feet
By the time the first phase was committed, my train was departing Glasgow for Belfast, and a second chance to make a city of our time. Meanwhile, back at the Big Hoose, a near top-to –bottom revamp left the Centre under other management. What next? Reyner Banham's 'Age of the Masters' gives the answer "...there won't be much next. What has been built so far is a small fraction of Copcuttt's original design, but it seems all that is going to be built in this particular mega-mode."
And, although Banham doesn't say it, this fragment- still big enough to define a future- was shorn not only of its second row of pylons and penthouses, with a host of functional and spatial consequences, but also of the mosaic of sites I had tucked in for flea-markets, the winter-garden front to the tiers of offices, the tube roof illuminating the chapel, the glistening 'airplane wing' which was to have tilted open over the library, and even the wall of dwellings with upper promenade designed to curtain the parkland. The curved and stepped terraces of apartments and earthworks arrayed at the 'Glasgow' portal, I always knew would take a lot of shaking and moving to make happen. But countless minor delights clothing the concept were not so much 'simplified' as simply missed.
Cool Head
Still, how lucky I was to have got the brief. Years earlier, reporting on the same day, Derek Lyddon and I cordially agreed (Sir Hugh refereeing) to toss for duties. Derek had the pipe, the coin and the call, I had the beard and the prayer. Out of that spin was to develop a satisfying division of labour, and a life-long respect between us.
Those to whom it may seem that the toss was a poor deal for the Centre can be consoled that the rest of the town was spared my attentions. Those to whom it seems blindingly obvious that there is little alternative in urban hot-spots to a decked development, will as easily observe that the execution of this exemplar was made possible by the awesome powers presented by New Towns legislation.

From "Rebuilding Scotland" by Miles Glendinning

Memories from Brian Miller

Geoff Copcutt was the chief architect for the Town Centre,or the Group Leader for the Town Centre and he was basically a loose cannon. There were always shouts from Hugh Wilson going “ oh god have you not done this….” A couple of books, one on Glasgow, one of his plans was to cover over the Clyde and build on that. The library used to have the book, it was a series of projects…. He had very strange ideas.
Like with the town centre model: he had collected these little cornflake model rockets, placed them around the perimeter for this visiting party which happened to be Russians… and I’m almost sure that immediately Cumbernauld became some red dot on some target chart in Moscow , cos it was seen we had already planned the rockets….

Copcutts drawings
They were about 10 yards long, he'd take a roll of this detail paper and pin it to the wall.
A bamboo stick with a brush, indian ink, and he did these sketches . I think he saw himself as an action painter …in concrete…

There was an american fullbright scholar came and lived in Carbrain, name of Rod Hardy, he got a book out of it. It’s got all the people writing about the thing.
AP in queensgate… I got a copy, …
But when Geoff came back from Portadown,and when cumbernauld was doing phase 2 he said a bit disdainfully,
“ oh they’ll just want to extrude Phase 1” like a tube of toothpaste, and he’d seen it totally different how the town would expand. He’d changed his ideas a bit, he saw bigger structures, disdained what he had already produced? Because in a sense I think it was designed to be like that. That it would just continue.

After he left I actually took over his office- and he got the job at Portadown building a new town there. The laugh was that within the office he had caused tears and terrible pressures,architects crying…
You see, the new towns Stevenage East Kilbride Harlow and so on had happened since 1947. 10 years later on Cumbernauld became a Mark 2 new town, And it seemed to break the logjam. Subsequently Hugh Wilson left, Skelmersdale Runcorn and all that had happened so there was a constant flow of architects that had got stuck at a financial level, could move to another New Town and get better wages.
So planner Ben Prince, who’d put forward the proposal for the University on the Hill, he went for the job at Portadown as did Geoff. So they met at the airport: Geoff had had his white suit, or his deckchair checkered suit, and Ben almost fell over cos geoff arrived in a tail-coat- you know, pinstripe morning coat and trousers. Gone to Moss Bros and ordered that. “going to meet the Irish Government, got to look good.” So he arrived, ben was interviewed, then Geoff was interviewed.
So all these NI civil servants asked him “Mr Copcutt-for offices would you just use the same kind of system as Cumbernauld?’ He says”NoNo…Harland and Wolf! Aluminium domes! Bring them on to the site by helicopters.’ (laughter)
These civil servants just fell in love with this man.
“ We’re just going to tip the whole town so it can look at the loch. “
And what happened was he got the job there and then. So they said.”would you like to stay on a few days and interview the rest of your staff?’
So then all these architects who were trying to escape from Cumbernauld arrived in this room with Geoff who was by now looking slightly more disshevelled in this tailcoat…..” Oh Naw!
I did a google search, there’s this fantastic document where he turns round and says
‘ the moneys’ been mis-spent, it should be put in to Derry. You shouldn’t build a new town.” It was a town of 7000 catholics and 8000 protestants. so planners go and look, do the sums. In that part of Ireland there were huge numbers of people with no vote,
So many of these planners were absolutely shocked, they’d never come across this sort of thing . And so geoff within a year told them “no, I’m not going to do this” he did something outside Dublin and then disappeared. Don’t know where he is...