‘[In that place], is building upon building’
Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17.
Welcome back to the blog, Everyone!
Grab yourself a pew.
Take the weight off.
Get yourself comfortable.
‘Coz today, we’re off on an adventure!
Where?
Well, it’s a town slap, bang in the middle of Scotland’s Central Belt: a town that boasts an airfield, an Irn Bru Factory and one of the country’s first recognised megastructures.
What’s it called….?
If you’re Ronnnie Corbet, voicing the long-running TV advert for the place in the ’80s and ’90s, it’s ‘Cumbrrrrnawled’.
To anyone who’s actually lived near it, however, it will always be ‘Cummer nudd’. Tricky? To get it right, you need to say it forcefully, bordering on aggressively, with a heavy emphasis on the ‘nudd’ bit at the end. Try it again… There you go! ‘Cummernudd’!
I’m not from Cumbernauld. As we established a few posts back, I grew up in the neighbouring town of Kilsyth – a smaller, sleepier, and hillier place, about 5 miles to the Northwest. But Cumbernauld, and its various retail outlets played an important part in my digital evolution. It offered the promise of arcade experiences, and a gateway to the world of home computing so pivotal to my own journey, that am gunna havta talk about it here, and in the first few posts of my forthcoming ‘Fizzy Pixels’ series of blogposts.
This may shock you.
In preparation for today’s Odyssey I’ve only gone and been to Cumbernauld. Not just in my memory, or the internet, but #IRL!!!
Don’t worry! I escaped more or less unscathed. And the best bit is that I now have an SD card full of nostalgia-drenched photos to share with you. I’m not just talking about ‘now’ shots either – but a bunch of ‘then’ shots from back-in-the-day too! This is exciting stuff, people!
Fair warning: This is a nostalgia trip with video-game related colour. While there is arcade content here, we’re going to focus on the venues that weren’t. To find out what I mean by that, you’ll have to read on. But I’m hoping the journey will inspire you cling on tightly to my time-traveling surf board as I ride that wave of nostalgia to the before times, and the world of 8-bit micro computers.
To do it all the justice it deserves, we’re gunna need to start with some proper context.
Cumbernauld
Cumbernauld Village in 1898, 1950, & c. 2015.
There’s been a small village at Cumbernauld since at least the 13th century, when it started appearing in maps and charters. That’s not why it’s called Cumbernauld. The name doesn’t signal that the place is ‘auld’ (Note to Englanders, that’s how we say ‘old’). It’s from the Gaelic, *Comar nan allt, meaning ‘Place where the streams meet’. Bet that’s some #education you weren’t expecting, eh?
After the War, the green fields to the west of the Village were earmarked as the site for one of Scotland’s five ‘new towns’. Three decades of frenzied building later, they had disappeared under a sprawling complex of dormitory suburbs, orbiting an enormous brutalist ‘megastructure’. Seriously, that’s how it’s described by the architects’ association, RIBA.
To be absolutely clear, that doesn’t make it a ‘good thing’!
Objectively speaking, however, it’s fair to say that by the 1970s, Cumbernauld had been transformed. The charming village that was had been stripped of its name in the maelstrom of gleaming white harling and concrete. When the dust finally settled, the place now known as Cummernudd was exponentially bigger, and the longstanding dynamic between the village and the neighbouring town definitively turned on its head. Kilsyth with it’s 10,000 souls had once been a market town and a burghal centre – a hub for trade, commerce and administration, now it was very much the junior partner.
Cumbernauld New Town had muscled up to 50,000 men, women and weans (sounds like ‘waynes’: from ‘wee anes’, ‘bairns’, kids). With the local government reorganisation of 1976, when Scotland’s counties were abolished, it also came to house the lion share of Council offices and amenities (NB: online retailers, did you read that? Scotland doesn’t have counties, and hasn’t had any for 50 years. Stop making us fill in that box on your stupid forms!).
Kilsyth folk didn’t like that.
There was a general feeling that Cumbernauld got unfair advantages and special treatment, that poor old Kilsyth badly needed but never enjoyed.
You don’t need to take my word for that. Kilsyth’s local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle, had been amalgamated with The Cumbernauld News. So, the locals got to read about what was happening in both places, and complain about it all in one convenient forum!
They also complained from the gallery of District Council Meetings, as is recorded in the surviving minutes from the North Lanarkshire Archives in Motherwell. You can read a bit more on where and how I got my hands on this information here.
Having read through these materials, it’s clear to me that Cumbernauld did benefit from disproportionately large investment, supported by tax breaks, and some fairly ambitious and innovative planning. But that wasn’t because of corruption in the local authority – regardless of what the gossips were saying. It reflected something the gossips didn’t understand – the practical realities of running a ‘New Town’ as legislated by Westminster, and managed by the Cumbernauld Development Corporation, which had been set up to oversee the project.
Cumbernauld had a small cinema, where I went for an occasional helping of ’70’s shovel-ware, of the Herbie or Cat from Outer Space variety. There was also a theatre, which hosted a never-ending stream of national, local, and youth-group-type performances. Check out the promo for this 1982 show, ‘B’roo-ing’. ‘B’roo’ was what the previous generation had called the (Unemployment) Bureau – ie. the place you went to get your dole cheque. So, clearly, the issues covered were right up-to-date!
Sounds like the kids had fun. As you can see, details on the play itself are scant, but I’m guessing it was an uplifting tale of empowerment, where the disadvantaged and forgotten yoof of Cummernudd, somehow found the strength to succeed in life by turning their backs on poisonous distractions - like puggies and video arcade games. AAARRRRGH! What were they playing at!? It was the ’80s kids! You were supposed to be dissing Thatcher, not the aracde machines! Oh well, at least they were able to get hold of some actual video-games cabinets for props. And let’s face it, that’s probably the best UFO is fit for.
Of even greater interest was the swimming pool and sports complex called the Tryst. For a while, in the early 1980s, Kilsyth Primary School would bus its older pupils there and back of a Friday afternoon for the obligatory swimming lessons – presumably to minimise our chances of drowning when we went for a paddle in the King’s Lynn, up the Glen, or one of the abandoned quarries.
The tryst was great. Not only was it a venue for swimming, basketball and karate competitions, it was also a source of cheeky portions of chips. Sadly, and unlike many similar venues bitd, what it made up for in sportiness, it lacked in ‘spacies’. To the best of my memory, it had none. Not even a Frogger.
But I digress…
The jewel in Cumbernauld’s crown was it’s ever-expanding shopping centre, the Town Centre. Straddling the A8011 dual-carriageway, like an overfed Frenchman squatting over a traditional porcelain toilette, ‘The Centre’ has long attracted a very bad press. In fact, it’s the main reason that Cumbernauld has assembled such an enormous haul of Carbuncle-type awards over the years.
#NGL it ain’t exactly pretty.
It has to be stressed here that the problem is not the people, but the world-leading architects who preferred to make career-enhancing statements rather than places which are nice to live and work, or even, dare I say, functional. Flat roofs and concrete are never a particularly good look imho, but when you combine them with the relentless cold and damp of the Scottish climate, and the inevitable build up of slime and grime, you can kindof understand why the locals feel so resentful. To their general relief, and despite a cack-handed attempt by Historic Environment Scotland to get the place listed, the Council has now acquired the entirety of the megastructure, with the aim of demolishing it, and replacing it with a modern community hub. Thank goodness I got in there with my camera first!
As you can see from this montage of photos from the 60s to the present, not a lot has changed. Having said that, I always found the Town Centre to be a strangely optimistic place. But that could well be because I stopped going there in the early 1990s, a few years before things really started going downhill. In any case, I have fond memories of driving up there with my parents in the 1970s. Usually on wet Saturdays. Our destination was the now-demolished Woolco superstore – an out-of-town Woolworths on steroids.
Originally opening in 1975, Woolco was a giant department store that sold clothes, household goods, sports equipment, toys, and groceries – virtually everything and anything at which you could shake the proverbial stick. While my parents rounded up the week’s messages (‘food shopping’), my brother and I were released into the aisles to keep ourselves a) occupied and b) out of their way.
We automatically gravitated towards the toy and book department. In the early days, we’d check out the toy cars, the Lego, and the Airfix kits. If I could work up the courage, I’d sometimes leaf through the Ladybird edition of Dracula or Frankenstein – fascinated and frightened in equal measure by the scary illustrations. Years later, in 1984, on one of the last visits I remember, I bought myself a paperback copy of the Return of the King for the princely sum of £1.95. Check out the picture below – it’s the actual book!
Of course, the toys would only hold our attention for so long, before the wanderlust set in. It was then that we first noticed the Death Star-style security cameras – those black hemispheres where you could never tell which way the camera was pointing? Mission Impossible-type spy shenanigans ensued.
Come the early 80s, the home entertainment landscape began to change. In response, Woolco introduced a counter of electronic games and consoles. Look at those prices! The top two are from The Kilsyth Chronicle, Thursday, 4th of November, 1982 (pp. 3 & 11), the bottom image from Thursday, 10th May, 1984 (p. 3)
It was here that I first encountered the mighty Vectrex.
For those of you who don’t know, the Vectrex was a cartridge-based video-games console originally released in 1982. It’s USP was a built-in 10″ CRT screen, which displayed vector rather than raster graphics. That means the lines were completely smooth rather than blocky, but with no curves. While the graphics were monochrome, colour effects – of sorts – were achieved with the help of coloured acetate overlays. Cutting edge stuff! Or maybe not.
I bought myself a Vectrex a few years ago, mainly off the back of recent homebrew releases, some of which are absolutely stunning. For my money, Kristof Tuts’ Vector Pilot and Vector Patrol are amongst the best – taking the arcade versions of Time Pilot and Moon Patrol, and making them even better! But that’s partly because they cheat, by using memory management techniques and other tricks not available to the first generation of programmers. The most extreme example of this is the mind-boggling VecFever cartridge, which by-passes the Vectrex’s circuitry completely, using it as monitor to output spookily faithful renditions of early ’80s arcade games like Asteroids and Star Wars.
In 1982, there wasn’t even a hint of a suggestion that this would be possible. In fact, to be absolutely honest, it’s prospects didn’t look particularly good. Now, don’t get me wrong, If I had been given a Vectrex back then, I’m sure I would have played it for a bit. But truth be told, it was fairly obvious – even then – that if was little more than a glorified toy – a slightly fancier version of the single-screen VFD games we were all familiar with. It was also extremely expensive for what it was – with games costing way more than most parents would have been happy replacing at the rate their kids got bored of them. That was the view of ten-year-old me. But I clearly wasn’t alone. It wasn’t long before the system bombed.
After months of gathering dust on the shelf, Woolco’s hoard were slashed to £50. But even at that price, no one would touch them. By that point, the ZX Spectrum had taken off, and – as we’ll see in Fizzy Pixels, £50 would have bought you a heck of lot of blank tapes.
But that was then. And things have changed. These days Vectrexes – Vectrices? Vectri? – sell for a pretty penny on eBay. A tidy, boxed specimen could set you back £400 or more.
Looking back, it’s one of those ‘tardis’ scenarios. You know the kind? If you had a tardis, and a bag of period bank-notes, you could nip back and grab yourself a pallet’s worth of the remaindered consoles for cheaps. Better still, you could wait until they didn’t sell and were being driven to the tip, then offered the skip driver a case of Tenents larger for the lot of them, and retired off the eBay profits. Mind you, if you knew where the tip was, you could probably still excavate a few today. Sand-damaged E.T. cartridge anyone? No thanks, I’ll take a composted Vectrex instead, please!
Things started to go wrong for Woolco in the mid-1980s. Too much competition you see. Although we didn’t realise it at the time, the signs were there from 1984. Increasingly heavy advertising in The Chronicle, was probably one of them. By 1986, it had closed.
The building itself was used for a few more years – first by Gateway, then ASDA – who kept the popular Red Grill cafe going, pretty much until the end. By the mid-1990s, however, not even ASDA could make the site work. When it finally closed it doors, the building was demolished, ultimately being replaced by the eastern end of the ‘new’ Antonine Centre.
One of the reasons for the demise of Woolco, and the unit it occupied, was the continued growth of of Cumbernauld Town Centre. Of course, when it opened in 1975, Woolco had benefitted from integration into the existing mall. At the point where the two joined, customers could enjoy the spectacle of the giant clock from the old St Enoch station in Glasgow, which once linked the area to the metropolis.
On my recent visit, I was excited to learn that the clock was still on display. Unfortunately, thanks to the damage caused by January’s high winds, quite a lot of the Centre was locked down or otherwise inaccessible. While my legs are long enough, and my neck brassy enough to ignore out-of-bounds signs, that didn’t help to unlock the doors to the installation. So, the closest I got this time round was the mural in the corridor outside.
By 1981 the Mega-Structure had expanded into Phase 4. And that was a game changer. I remember those buildings going up, and the sense of anticipation about all the new shops that would be moving in. But we’ll return to those, and the promised photos in the next blogpost. Right now, it’s time to focus on…
The arcade that wasn’t!
If the retro games press had their way, 1983 and 1984 would forever be associated with the ‘Great Video Games Crash’. Apparently that’s when the ground gave way under the over-heated home and arcade scene in the USA, forcing manufacturers like Atari to bury huge amounts of unsellable stock in the desert.
That didn’t happen in the part of Scotland were I grew up.
On the contrary, 1983 is precisely when we experienced an almost magical boom in both arcade and home video-gaming. Sales of old-fashioned cartridge-based had certainly stalled, but hardly anyone was buying them anyway. This was when sales of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 really started to soar. As for the arcades, while the US market may well have become over-saturated with dedicated cabinets designed to play single games, venues in Scotland operated a more ‘homely’ business model, based on generic cabinets, and illegally imported bootleg PCBs. Between 1982 and 1984, the number of video-arcades in my own small town, increased from a disappointing zero to three! That’s not to say, however, that we weren’t eager for more.
As mentioned earlier, the good citizens of Kilsyth kept abreast of developments in Cumbernauld, through their shared newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle (and Cumbernauld News). In early 1984, there were murmerings of something big in the arcade world – rumours which I’ve since been able to flesh out with a bit of digging in the archived minutes of Cumbernauld & Kilsyth District Council.
In their meeting of 10th of February 1984, the Coonsil’s agenda included an item titled ‘Amusement Arcade Town Centre’. They were to seek opinion on the Cumbernauld Development Corporation’s plan for an amusement arcade in the town centre, housing up to 60 machines, with ‘video machines’ at the front adjacent to a ‘soda fountain’, whatever that was supposed to be. There were concern that this might damage a market already served by the County Bingo venue, which was licenced to carry 40 ‘amusement with prizes’ machines.
While further detail is lacking, the plans became a lot clearer, and a lot more exciting in the Coonsil meeting of 12th March. The agenda this time included an item on the ‘Proposed conversion of former Templeton Unit in Phase II for use as a ‘Leisureplex”. Yes, you read that right, ‘Leisureplex’. Lol!
The Development Corporation went on to explain that 2/3 of the arcade would be set aside for ‘videos’, and 1/3 for gaming machines. This gaming machine area would moreover be separated, manned and supervised at all times. What that means, dear readers, is that Cummernudd was looking at a venue with 40 video arcade games! In 1984! Can you imagine that?!!! That’s Blackpool or Scarborough levels of excitment!!!
The planning went from strength to strength.
On the 13th of June, the project was granted a Public Entertainment Licence for a ‘Soft drinks parlour and amusement arcade at Tweed / Tay Walks in Cumbernauld Town Centre’. Then, on the 3rd of September, a licence was issued under the Gaming Act 1968, ensuring that machines with prizes could be legally sited provided that: 1) No child under 16 years of age was to be admitted unless accompanied by an adult, and 2) No child wearing a school uniform was admitted during school hours.
The minutes noted there were ‘no objections’, but that didn’t stop the miserable hack from the Chronicle putting a negative spin on it.
On the 13th of September, he reported that the Leisure Centre was only given a ‘reluctant go-ahead’. Note the emphasis given to McElroy’s strangely contradictory ramble about the ‘great deal of support throughout the community for a facility of this nature’, but the development being somehow ‘worrying’. Sigh. What an old Elmer.
Without the benefit of some photos it’s difficult to imagine where this ‘Leisureplex’ might have been. But look what I’ve found!
As a supermarket, Templeton’s covered a fair amount of floor space. It also straddled one of the entrances to the Town Centre, which meant that it could theoretically stay open after the shopping mall itself had closed for the evening. If you take a look at the view looking inside, and the view from the outside, below, you’ll see the area linked together by the pub, Bar Yellow.
With a build-up like this, the arcade was bound to be absolutely, world-turningly awesome. And you’ll no doubt be keen to know how it worked out – which games from 1984 and 1985 made the cut, where they could be found in the venue, and what, exactly the mysterious ‘soda fountain’ arrangement involved. Well, so would I. Because, you see, as far as I know, it never happened 😦
In the end, the owners seem to have pivoted into a simple, common or garden bar, sinking the bulk of their efforts into the re-developing the loading bay underneath into a nightclub – the late, lamented Papa Docs.
A year later, in September 1985, The Chronicle celebrated the opening of Papa Docs with a full-page spread. As you can see in the adverts surrounding the blurb, half the contractors in Cumbernauld were involved in the project. Whether they were paid in cash, or free drinks at the bar is anyone’s guess!
While this came as a bitter disappointment to my 13-year-old self, it wasn’t that long before I was visiting Papa Doc’s myself. I preferred the Sax rock bar at the other end of the building, in the top floor of what is now ‘Spoon’s Carrick Stone pub. While Sax closed at 1 am. PD’s kept going to at least 3, and you know, ‘needs must’ etc. But that’s another story…
Epilogue
So there you have it. While I know there were arcade machines in Cumbernauld back in the early 1980s, I only saw them used as props in an advert for a youth theatre production in 1982. And despite advanced plans for a 40-cab amusement arcade, with ‘soda fountain’, in the old Templeton’s supermarket, that particular bottle of pop went flat before it was even opened. Sad times indeed. Somebody pass a tiss-shoe.
Did you grow up in Cumbernauld? Did you visit it in the 1980s? Do you remember any actual arcade machines out in the wild? If so, please leave a note in the comments below and help add a happy ending to this tale of woe.
Coming Next…
This Arcade Eco-System series has already covered the most important (!) parts of central Scotland from 1982 to 1995. If you haven’t seen them already, feel free to explore the links below. But even if you have, please do go back and add the conversation. I’m really keen to fill the gaps in my memory before it finally starts to wear out:
Part 1 – Kilsyth (See also Part 1 Extra – The Archives)
The next part in the series will see us head back east to Auld Reekie, where I relocated in 1995. For the time being, however, we’ll be sticking with Cummernudd!
Stay tuned for Fizzy Pixels – Part 1: The ZX Spectrum.
Arcade Odysseus 
Another interesting deep dive into ‘one mega city’, or should that be ‘mega city one’, from your early photo…
A town of it’s time, or time for a new town… So many re-development schemes rarely get off the planning table these days, so at least they got it done.
Anyhoo, my appetite has been whet, ‘Fizzy Pixels’ you say…..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cheers Neil. Mega City Number Two perhaps? (snigger). If Cumbernauld Town Centre was a ‘town of its time’, that time would have to be 1955, before it was actually built! I’m sure it seemed like a much better idea in the architects’ heads, than the mouldy reality guaranteed by the Scottish weather. As I’ll argue next time, phase IV was great when it was new. But as long as I can remember, there have been calls to knock the rest of it down. For the sake of the folks who live there, I hope the council lives up to its promises. Of course, the ultimate enigma of Cumbernauld Town Centre, the futuristic design fantasy, is why it never had a flippin’ video arcade?!
LikeLiked by 1 person