The Carbuncle Awards: Cumbernauld honoured

Congratulations to the North Lanarkshire town of Cumbernauld, which has been awarded the 2001 Carbuncle Award as 'the most dismal place in Scotland', beating off competition from Gretna, Aviemore, Dumbarton and two areas of Edinburgh.

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Q. What are the Carbuncle Awards

A. Run by Unlimited, a Scottish business magazine, the annual Carbuncle Awards celebrate the most miserable urban environments in the country.

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Q. Why are the awards presented

A. The prize was established to open up debate about the built environment and encourage more ambitious projects. Unlimited say: 'While there are impressive regeneration projects under way in areas like the Gorbals, the development process as a whole is disappointing.'

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Q. Presumably the awards have their critics

A. They do. They are dismissed as 'superficial and negative' by leading architectural critics, and on the eve of the announcement of this year's 'winners' the director of the Manifesto Foundation for Architecture dismissed the ceremony as 'an appalling way for the architecture profession to behave'.

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Q. Why 'carbuncle'

A. It comes from the 1984 speech by Prince Charles to the Royal Institute of British Architects, in which he described a particular design for the extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, as 'a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'.

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Q. And why poor old Cumbernauld

It should be stressed that the award is for the town centre development rather than the town as a whole. The centre was described as Scotland's answer to Kabul, 'a rabbit warren on stilts' and as dismal as last year's winner Airdrie, also in North Lanarkshire. Judges said the concrete centre was soulless and inaccessible, 'something like Eastern Europe before the wall came down'. A spokesman for Unlimited said: 'It is not a deprived area, and it is not suffering from a lack of investment, what appears to be lacking is political will and sensible planning.'

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Q. How did the movers and shakers in Cumbernauld take the 'honour'

A. Badly, as you'd imagine. Archie Fleming, the editor of the Cumbernauld News, is quoted on the BBC website as saying: 'I think the people of Cumbernauld are very proud of their town, but they are very ashamed of their town centre...People are flocking to come and live in Cumbernauld, but you only have to look at the letters page of the Cumbernauld News each week to see that the biggest single issue that troubles people is the town centre.'

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Q. What do the people of Scotland think of the awards

A. The Carbuncles provoke an equal measure of excitement and outrage. Debates on radio phone-ins and in the letters pages of the Scottish press were heated. The Carbuncles' website was inundated with e-mails condemning the categories of Most Dismal Town and Most Disappointing Development.

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Q. What other awards were handed out

A. The worst building was Glasgow's new maternity hospital at the Royal Infirmary. Two developments in Edinburgh were also nominated: a business plaza called The Exchange - described as 'architecture on steroids' - and Haymarket Station. One person apparently said of Haymarket station that 'waiting for a train here is like waiting for the end of the earth'.

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Q. And a quick history of Cumbernauld

A. The name comes from the Gaelic cumar-nan-alt, meaning 'meeting of waters', and its origins go back to before the middle ages. By the 17th century it was a major centre for hand-loom weaving, though mining and quarrying later came to dominate the economy. Designated a new town in 1956, it won numerous architectural awards for its innovative design. The now derided town centre featured shops and homes above a delivery and access network of roads. While the concept was ground-breaking and the housing on the outskirts popular for their imaginative use of open space, woodland and parkland, the centre is now one of the least attractive in the whole of the UK.

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Q. Any interesting facts about the town

A. It was the first town in the UK to feature roundabouts. Not a lot of people know that - at least not outside Cumbernauld.

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By Simon Smith