Monday, March 07, 2005
Scottish town nominates itself for destruction on TV.
Britain has a new reality television show, Demolition, that promises to destroy on camera a building that its viewers vote the ugliest. Its producers never expected an entire town to volunteer itself...
Britain has a new reality television show, Demolition, that promises to destroy on camera a building that its viewers vote the ugliest. Its producers never expected an entire town to volunteer itself...
Too ugly to live: the award-winning town begging to be put out of its misery on TVWhat is Cumbernauld's problem? As you can hear in this radio interview...
... 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...
In 2001 Cumbernauld won the Carbuncle Award for the most dismal place in Scotland, described by the judges as “a rabbit warren on stilts” and “soulless and inaccessible, something like Eastern Europe before the Wall came down”.
In 2003 The Idler’s Book of Crap Towns, naming it the second-worst place to live in the UK — beaten only by Hull — said of it: “Town planning students visit Cumbernauld as an example of what not to do.”
To cap it all, a survey last year named Cumbernauld as the town with the most shopping trolleys dumped in the streets.
Kenneth McLellan, 31, a bus driver who has always lived in Cumbernauld, said: “It’s a lovely place, no one around here would nominate it for demolition — apart from certain parts of the town centre which I have to admit is a monstrosity. That should be blown up..." [ToL]
It was designed by the government to be a model town for the 21st century ... they didn't want walkways beside roads so they built an entire separate network of walkways with their own overpasses and underpasses, but that proved very expensive, so the government economized on the housing, which is cold and wet ... the housing was built of concrete, which is hard to do anything with when fashions change, and built on stilts over what was to be a commercial district that largely never appeared ... the Kabul of Scotland...
