DROPPED FROM OUTER SPACE by Alison Irvine

An essay from Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town Centre – a limited edition art book that documents and explores Cumbernauld Town Centre and its imminent demolition through the eyes of its residents, past and present. During their 18-month-long research project, the award-winning artists of Recollective – Alison Irvine, Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller – gained exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Cumbernauld New Town’s iconic Town Centre.

This is the story of how we finally got to see inside the former penthouses, the famous five-storey apartments, now closed to the public and lived in only by pigeons, in a part of the Town Centre that seems to thrust into thin air. The penthouses are perhaps the most iconic and recognisable part of the Town Centre megastructure. Yes, you’ll be aware of the whole boxy, concrete conglomerate with all its horizontal and vertical lines, you’ll recognise the glass and the blue paint and the inside-outness of it all. But the train-carriage-like part with porthole windows, all two-tone concrete and glass, which juts prow-like into the air and is supported – balanced, seemingly – by one gallus shaft of concrete, that’s the famous bit of Cumbernauld Town Centre. ‘Check me out,’ it could be saying. ‘Look what I can do.’ Still standing.

In our interviews the penthouses were mentioned without fail. People talked of the parties, the glamour, the views, the proximity to the Falcon bar and of their aspirational quality. ‘I really wanted to live in one of those,’ said Alison who moved to Cumbernauld when she was a teenager. ‘Being in the centre of it so that you could essentially wander down to the library in your dressing gown if you really wanted to.’

In one of our first interviews, we spoke to a woman, Eleanor, whose friend had a sticker on her kitchen window. Eleanor’s friend lived in a village near to Cumbernauld. Her kitchen had a view of the Town Centre and the sticker was placed to block out the megastructure. She couldn’t stand it. To have lived in the penthouses, however, was to have had the most amazing views over all the villages nearby and across to the Campsie Fells, North Lanarkshire and beyond. We were keen to see those views. We’d heard such talk of them. I imagined an arty photograph of fields and blue sky taken through one of the porthole windows, with just enough of the window in the frame to show where we were. We needed to apply for access.

This is the story, then, of the penthouses and how we finally got to see them from the inside. It’s also the story of John, the Town Centre manager and keeper of the penthouse keys, and it includes mention of buckets, high winds, Town Centre maintenance and marauding youngsters.

The penthouse flats (thirty-five in total) were built for executives; Town Centre living right where the action was. If you lived in a penthouse flat you lived above the shops, next to the purpose-built club, the Falcon, which became the Cumbernauld Development Corporation club (or CDC club for short) containing function hall, pool tables, darts, bowling and a bar. You’d get to the flats via ramps with no roofs, so it could be wet and windy up there. One main doorway led to two separate flats, one going up and one going down, so in you’d go through the front door and find five levels of kitchen, bathroom, living space and bedrooms. Iain had a friend who lived in number 2. Carol, for a reason she can no longer remember, missed out on going to a party in one of the flats, and never saw inside them.

We spoke to John Bruce, manager of the Town Centre. He hadn’t been in his post for long when we first made contact. North Lanarkshire Council had announced its intention to buy the Town Centre and plans were being drawn up for the sale. John was in charge on behalf of the current owners, and was responsible for running the shopping centre, too. He was busy, harassed – I want to say beleaguered but that would be untrue because he seemed to take a kind of relish in his job and thrive on all the buffeting and complaints and slings and arrows sent his way. Plus, he knew the Town Centre of old, and his job for him was a labour of love. He told us he used to come to the Town Centre as a child: ‘This monster of a thing on stilts . . . it looked like somebody just dropped it from outer space.’ His mum would take him for a haircut and a lollipop and buy him a single afterwards from the record shop.

‘No,’ he said when we first asked him about seeing the penthouses. They weren’t owned by the current landlord, they wouldn’t even be owned by North Lanarkshire Council after the sale. It was an outright no. He’d had requests from Historic Environment Scotland that he’d had to turn down, he told us, as well as requests from the Scottish Government to see bits of the Town Centre that were blocked off from the public. He’d had to say no to everyone. He then told us there was much of the Town Centre that was no longer accessible, either because those particular bits weren’t owned by North Lanarkshire Council or due to health and safety reasons. Remember the shop called What Everyone Wants? Yes, we said. (Most of our interviewees who were old enough to remember the clothes shop had told us about it.) The original sign was downstairs in the basement. Can we see that? we asked. ‘No,’ John said.

John works from a windowless office in the area where the banks are, next door to the Cumbernauld and Carbrain Community Hub. For all of our meetings we would climb the short flight of steps and stand in the small lobby and be brought through to the back, past the control room, into his office where he would drink cans of diet fizzy drinks – he doesn’t take tea or coffee – and wait for him to finish his emails. He was always busy; the months before the sale of the building were fraught. There’s room in his office for a desk where he sits and a table where we sat. On one of the walls is a blown-up plan of the Town Centre as it is today. John is another of those Cumbernauld residents who can remember exactly where things once were. Whereas I saw a collection of numbered rectangles in the shape of a shopping centre, John could reel off all the iterations of, for example, unit 19 and conjure up long-gone shop-names and demolished walls. It’s a passion, I would say. He loves this building.

He told us of a recent contretemps with someone else with a passion for Cumbernauld; a writer who’d posted some photographs from inside the penthouses on his blog. John was irked, it was obvious, about this man, Kirkland Ciccone, who’d somehow got through the locked doors and gone where access was prohibited. Had he persuaded one of John’s staff to let him through? However the breach had occurred, John sent a strongly worded email to the writer. When he told us this we realised that there’d be no sneaking up and trying to catch a quick glimpse on John’s watch. Which made us want to get into the penthouses even more. It made me want to meet Kirkland too. Intrepid, I thought. Bold. I read Kirkland’s blog and discovered he worked in Cumbernauld Library, another of the town’s beloved institutions. When we found him he preferred to keep a dignified silence about his penthouse blog and the email from John but one thing he did say was that many of the photographs had been taken at a Doors Open Day a few years previously. Kirkland had been a lover of the Toonie. Now, with regret and a deal of humour, he is desperate for it all to go. Even the penthouses? we asked. ‘Even the penthouses,’ he said.

Kirkland took us through a fire door onto the flat roof next to the library and we looked up. Above us were wind-wrecked window frames, tattered bits of insulation, faded cladding and plenty of pigeons. Chris took some photographs. It was a view of the belly of the penthouses we wouldn’t have ordinarily seen. We were getting closer. The views were good on this brilliant and beautiful day. They’d be even better from the penthouses.

What could John show us of the Town Centre, even if he couldn’t allow us to see the penthouses? Lots, it turned out. He generously gave us several Town Centre tours over several months along with commentary of what used to be where and when. ‘It’s a city,’ he told us, ‘it’s a town within a town,’ as he took us through tiled public concourses, past barber shops and banks, a sweet shop, jeweller’s shops and larger chains such as Farmfoods and Argos, while canned music played ‘Mull of Kintyre’. It’s a sprawling spread of a shopping centre, with near-empty escalators whirring, when they’re working. There’s little hustle and bustle but people are always on the move, passing through, not stopping, avoiding the many buckets placed in clumps and clusters on the floor.

The buckets. Second in fame, or infamy, to the penthouses are the buckets. We saw plenty of them on our Town Centre tours with John. They’re on the main concourse, they’re up on the library level, they’re stored in discreet corners alongside mops and hazard signs. And the buckets aren’t uniform in style, they’re all colours, all shapes and sizes, and this creates an air of haphazardness, of things falling apart, which John, I’m sure, would hate. He was closest to seeming beleaguered when speaking about the buckets and didn’t find funny someone’s quip on Facebook along the lines of When the Town Centre is demolished what will they do with all the leftover buckets?

  ‘It’s very damp and very difficult and very challenging,’ he said when we asked what it was like to manage the Town Centre. The buckets, for example, not only catch raindrops but they catch condensation too. Sometimes it can be warmer outside than inside and moisture drips from the glass roof. Checking the weather forecast on a regular basis is a crucial part of John’s job. They have a machine, a big water-sucker-vacuum-dryer affair that does the floors first thing in the morning and, if necessary, several times a day. Sometimes gusts of wind can push collected rain from one roof onto another roof which then drips through vents designed to let out smoke in a fire. ‘So, it doesn’t always leak when it’s raining. It could be two days later if the wind changes direction,’ he said. For every complaint about the buckets – and we heard many – John could come back with an explanation.

John manages a staff of twenty-one; housekeeping, maintenance and security. He could be working at six in the morning and he could be working at nine at night. If a sprinkler goes off in the night, it’s his colleague Willy who will attend, but John might be needed to sign off a risk assessment for a contractor in an emergency. ‘I’m always available. Because there is always a risk. Twenty-four hours a day we’ve still got the public in this building. We might not have retailers. We might not have shoppers. But we have people walking through.’ Until recently, it was law that the Town Centre stayed open all night to act as a thoroughfare from one side of the dual carriageway to the other as well as being a route to the bus station. That posed challenges. The Town Centre never closed. A security guard stayed all night. During the day, John told us that footfall was around ten to twelve thousand people a week. In the days when the Inland Revenue building (now demolished) was occupied there were thirty thousand people a week, at least. How do you change a lightbulb? I asked. ‘We’ve got cherry pickers. We’ve got scaffolding,’ John said. Most of the big work takes place at night. Christmas decorations, for example, will go up after the shops have closed.

‘The day-to-day operation, it’s a challenge,’ John said. ‘But I’d love to have operated it in its heyday. When all the bigger retails were here and the footfall. I think that would have been an amazing challenge.’ He pointed out one of the Town Centre’s ninety security cameras. Can we photograph the control room? Chris asked. ‘No,’ John said, because the sale hadn’t gone through.

When the sale finally went through, in Spring 2023, we asked again if we could see inside the penthouses. ‘No,’ John said, because they weren’t the property of the new owners, North Lanarkshire Council. They still belonged to another company, Swan Holdings, who had bought them years back with a view to returning them to residential flats. ‘You’ll need to ask the owners,’ John said. Fair enough. So we did and waited for a reply.

Meanwhile, John took us onto another roof. Seagulls squawked overhead. It was another beautiful summer’s day and despite the wind it was warm. John pointed out the roof that hung onto rainwater which in gusty winds was blown through the pesky vents and onto the Town Centre floor. He pointed out the nursery – it has a roof garden that overlooks the dual carriageway that is Central Way. He showed us the penthouses – oh we saw them! – and he showed us the former CDC club. The CDC club we never ever gained access to, because of the pigeons which had created an atmosphere so toxic you needed special breathing apparatus if you wanted to go inside. He showed us the town hall too. We saw it through windows that reflected our faces in the bright sunshine. Everything was tantalisingly close but inaccessible.

We’d been told so much about these sacred places. Life’s big events happened there. Another Alison had her engagement party in the CDC club. Grace had a joint eighteenth birthday party in the lesser town hall. These parts of the Town Centre formed the fabric of people’s social lives. A man we interviewed called John used to go to the country and western nights and take part in fast-draw competitions at the CDC club. Iain went to the bowling in the club and visited the chippy or the Chinese takeaway afterwards. It’s hard to imagine a fish and chip shop, now, on the third floor, where I’m not sure the public are even allowed to go. The Golden Eagle Hotel, which it was close to, has long been pulled down. Town Centre manager John talked of getting fish and chips before his nights out. And after an evening spent drinking Moscow Mules aged fifteen in Arena, one of the bars inside the Golden Eagle Hotel, Connie told us she would head to the chippy for a steak pie supper ‘for walking down the road’. When she was younger Connie went to the Town Hall discos. John did too. Connie would stand with the thirteen and fourteen year old girls on one side of the hall, watch the boys on the other side and wait to be asked to dance.

The reminiscence sites on Facebook are full of memories of functions and parties and, quite simply, fun. I found one photograph of what the CDC club looked like from the inside, long disused when the photograph was taken, but its dusky pink plush seats that line the length of one wall give a hint of the comfort and promise of the room. John used to go to the Kestrel, he told us, and a nightclub called Sax. He’d meet his friends at the clock because it was central for everyone who lived in all parts of the town. The St Enoch Clock has been moved since it was immortalised by its appearance in the film Gregory’s Girl and served as a meeting point for the town’s youth. It’s blocked off now.

After peering through the municipal windows we returned to John’s office, and because the Town Centre was in the hands of North Lanarkshire Council, and because North Lanarkshire Council had given us permission to take photographs, we were allowed to step inside the security office. This was a treat. ‘The nerve centre,’ John said, and we found his colleague Willy sitting at a wide desk in front of a wall of television screens and CCTV images. Willy wore his security guard’s black uniform. On his desk were two office telephones, several computer mice, gadgets for moving cameras remotely, and a can of Pepsi Max. Underneath the desk was a tangle of cables. Above the desk monitors displayed different parts of the Town Centre; sixteen squares on each screen. We could see the escalators, we could see the ramp up to the library and we could see inside the corridors of Carron House where one or two of the offices were still occupied. Lifts, corridors, car parks, bus station, entrances and exits, all were shown in close-up and miniature. ‘Ninety-six per cent coverage,’ John said. There was one area where you couldn’t be seen by cameras, he told us, and the drug addicts knew about it. That’s where they went.

  I asked Willy what he’d do if he saw something on one of his screens – a crime, an accident or incident. He said he would radio his colleagues and someone on the floor would attend. Do you ever leave these screens? I asked. The room was small and intense and the screens overpowering. ‘I just sit here with my juice and my sweets and my lunch,’ he said. Music from Planet Rock played from the room’s speakers. He said he was grateful not to have to listen to the live-streamed music piped throughout the Town Centre, heard most loudly in the empty red corridor between the library and the old market hall.

What do you like most about your job? I asked Willy and he found it hard to answer. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just get up and come to work. It’s as simple as that.’ His work is minutes from where he lives which might explain his twenty-seven years in the job. ‘It’s flew in. It really has. And it hasn’t really changed much.’

One aspect of his job that has changed in recent years is the kids – the ‘little darlings’ John called them – that congregate in the bus station and annoy the security guards and passersby. What do they do? I asked. They try to set fire to the brushes on the sides of escalators. They throw burning cardboard into the lifts. ‘Smashing up lift doors. Destroying things. Verbally abusing members of the public.’ Most of the kids are under sixteen or perhaps even under fourteen. ‘The same faces,’ Willy told us. ‘Lots of kids won’t come up here because of the other kids.’ I’ve heard all this from people we’ve interviewed. Other youngsters are scared of them. Adults are scared of them. Elizabeth and John, for example, Cumbernauld residents since the 1970s, don’t like the bus station, never have. They met me in the library, in good humour, sitting with their niece, Eleanor. Elizabeth used to work in Wrygges in the cash office and in sales. ‘The bus station has been a nightmare ever since we came out here,’ John said. ‘It’s not even a bus station. You can’t call it that,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Two town centres either side of a motorway. You should be shot!’ said John. But now, with the kids, they wouldn’t use it at night. ‘Sometimes during the day, you cannae hear your ears and they’re shouting,’ Elizabeth said.

Their Town Centre visits are limited to Tesco during the daytime. Kids are warned over the tannoy by Willy and his colleagues. They’re approached by security guards on duty. Sometimes they’re barred from the Town Centre but they come back. It’s somewhere to go.

Like my desire to see into the penthouses, I wanted to meet the kids.

Finally, we got permission from Swan Holdings to see inside the penthouses. At last, all the boxes were ticked. We sent an email to John requesting a visit and we got a shattering reply. He said he was busy. It was Swan Holding’s responsibility to show us around. If a representative from the company could arrange a time, he would allow it.

Perhaps John had an instinct for a dramatic storyline. Perhaps he knew that to add a final hurdle just when we thought we’d reached the finish line would make for a good narrative. We were stumped. Gutted. Perplexed. Disappointed. Swann Holdings are a huge company. We doubted they’d make one of their staff available, for free, to show us around. We didn’t know what to do.

Time passed. Winter did its frenzied business and the new year blew in. High winds and a hurricane came to the West of Scotland and shattered Town Centre windows and blew off parts of the roof. John had to close the whole building for several days while it was made safe. Kirkland Ciccone posted a photograph on X of smashed-out windows by his library workplace.

We thought we’d never get in to see the penthouses. We thought we would do the whole project and have to say at its end, No, we didn’t see inside the most famous and iconic of all of Cumbernauld Town Centre.

In desperation we asked a friend and former interviewee, a man we met when working on Glasgow’s Red Road Flats. He’s now a fire safety inspector and, incidentally, went to the same school in Barmulloch as John. They discovered this when Finlay came to inspect Cumbernauld Town Centre. Finlay, will you take us round the penthouses on one of your inspections? we asked. We could pretend to be your assistants? Unsurprisingly, Finlay said ‘No’.

We asked John again and this time, to our relief and delight, he said ‘Yes’. The Town Centre had just reopened. Order was restored but not without complaints and the highly publicised shutting down of a popular store. John put on his coat and grabbed a set of keys. He took us through a locked door and we walked up a red-floored ramp, white in places with wear or spilled plaster. I ran my hand along thick wooden window frames. John told me the ramps to the penthouses weren’t covered when he used to come up them as a child. ‘Open to the elements,’ he said, and told us his mother had a friend, a civil servant, who lived in one of the penthouses and they used to visit her. ‘This was all open. In the middle of winter. Windy. Freezing cold.’ It was cold. My fingers were cold as I held my Dictaphone towards him and followed his footsteps.

John continued to reminisce. ‘You’re walking up a ramp to go to your house or the pub,’ he said, and I learned that from the two up-ramps (and also from one of the lifts) you could get to the CDC club. Three bridges, one in the middle and one at each end. To reach the CDC club you needed to walk past the penthouse front doors. ‘Like a street!’ it dawned on me. We went as far as we could, along a pink-walled corridor to a set of double doors with a sign in capitals saying: ‘Membership Cards Must Be Shown’. The structure was solid but everything was faded; peeling paint, muddy footprints on the floor, builders’ detritus left where it was dropped.

John opened up one of the penthouse doors. ‘It’s difficult for someone who’s never been in here before, who didn’t see it before it changed into offices, it’s hard to understand what it was actually like,’ he said. ‘People were living in it and it was a very nice place.’

He was right. I had a photograph in my head, one Iain sent me, of a party in number 2 Avon Walk. The photographer is shooting upwards from the living room to the kitchen on the level above. Iain and a friend are standing together. He has his arm around her and he’s looking directly at the camera. She is looking off camera. Both are smiling. Behind him a man with long, centre-parted hair stands in shirt, tie and waistcoat, holding a glass of something, looking as if he could happily work his way around a guitar. Above them all, light glints off the wood-panelled ceiling and the lush wooden ceiling might be the star of the photograph were it not for Iain and his friend’s smiles. It’s a fabulous photograph, vibrant and full of life.

I saw none of that when I stood in the empty penthouse flat that day. The carpet we found was worn. There was a faded feel to the rooms as we stood inside and turned 360 degrees, picking out the details. One of the rooms had wood-panel wallpaper on its walls, a small hint at Iain’s photograph’s lustrous wooden ceiling. They were cold inside, littered with cables, everything gone and just the shell and abandoned bits and bobs left, including a copy of The Sun from April 2008, its headline Stop the Fuel Bandits. We saw a decaying pigeon in one flat and went no further.

The flats’ layout changed considerably when they were converted into offices in 1982-1983 and walls were knocked through. The original layout had a bedroom and bathroom on the lowest level, next was the landing where you entered the flats, above that was the living room with wide windows and panoramic views, above that the kitchen and above that the patio roof terrace.

I got glimpses. But there was little left that was original and it was hard for me to tell what was added-on and what had been there from the start. Even the windows had been replaced. The black handrails were original, John said, and I imagined the glamorous hands of dressing-gowned residents clutching library books going up and down.

‘Considering what people in Glasgow came from to come and live in Cumbernauld, this would have been luxury,’ John said. They were described as executive flats, along with flats in Park Way, Maclehose Road, Ainslie Road and the high rises. The application forms for these flats were light blue instead of white. A minimum annual salary of £1,500 was required.

I went down to look out of the famous porthole windows, to see, finally, the famous views everyone had talked about but, because of the low cloud and the gloomy weather, I saw very little. And because there was nothing to see in the distance my focus was turned towards the Antonine Centre below with its vast white flat roof and pipes and ventilation systems, added in 2004, to replace part of the demolished Phase One. This was on the land where the flat deck of Phase One stood, where children, including John, rode their bikes and some took their cycling proficiency tests. Twinkling beyond the Antonine Centre, below the cloud cover, were lights from the houses of north Carbrain. I looked at the view from the other side of the penthouses and saw a similarly grey sky and the interior windows and walls of the CDC club. So much glass. So much rain gathered in puddles on roofs.

We went out to the corridor in the sky, outside the flats’ front doors, and here is where I got a sense of what the penthouses would have been like in their heyday. Here, much was unchanged, including the rectangular white tiles on the walls and the columns of red on the buttress-like partition walls separating the flats with their cut-out circular glassless windows – to match the portholes on the sides. The portholes weren’t the original ones, John told us and reminded us that the whole corridor was covered now, whereas before it wasn’t. But here I got a sense of the ambition of the building. I could picture gunslingers walking in cowboy boots to the CDC club or workers heading for an evening pint or families coming up for a party. I could hear the running footsteps of John as a boy along with the countless other children who came up here to run and play and gallop about. ‘One recollection I do have of standing up here and playing as a kid is that it was cold. Even during the summer, because you’ve got the wind,’ he said, and we tightened our coats because the wind, even under a covered roof, was biting.

Part of one flat had been tested by Swan, the current owners, with a view to turning the penthouses back into residential apartments. There were marks on the walls – crosses and instructions and calculations – and part of the floor had been removed. They’d done tests on the concrete, John told us, and found it wanting, not strong enough. ‘To redevelop this now it will never meet the criteria without major infrastructure and major expense,’ John said, ever the pragmatist. It was sad to think that these extraordinary apartments in this extraordinary-shaped building with the exceptional views would be demolished. John wasn’t as sentimental: ‘I know there’s an argument to say that pulling it down and building something in its place creates more carbon but what could you actually do with it? You can’t convert it back into flats. You can’t make it comply with current fire regulations, with current building regulations. So it would just become this thing up in the sky.’

We had a last look around. I touched the walls for a final time and listened to the clicks and bleeps of Chris’s camera. I knew that John could be back, if he wanted, to relive his memories, but I had a feeling that this was my only opportunity. I tried to recreate the scene from the photograph of smiling, seventies-haired young people living their executive lifestyles. I like to think I had a sense of what that party might have been like. Something about the luxury of being in an apartment with five floors helped. The windows on either side did too; the flats were full of sky.

We closed the door and stepped back out onto the corridor. John locked the door at the bottom of the ramp and we walked through the Town Centre to his office. And that is the story of how we got access to the penthouses. It’s also the story of how John will manage the Town Centre, weather, buckets and all, until its demolition, while footsteps and canned music echo round the public parts of the building and while only pigeons and a lucky few like us get to see inside its most iconic and beloved places.

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Alison Irvine lives in Glasgow and is a writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. Her first novel This Road is Red (Luath 2011), based on the stories of residents and workers in Glasgow’s Red Road Flats, was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year award. Her second novel, Cat Step (Dead Ink 2020), was a BBC Radio 4 ‘Open Book’ Editor’s Pick, a Guardian readers’ choice, a Skinny book of the year and one of the iNews’s 50 best books for Christmas.

She is the writer in the artist collective Recollective www.recollective.org.uk and is currently working on Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town Centre, a Creative Scotland and William Grant Foundation funded project. www.concretedreams.org.uk

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