WHEN the makers of a new Channel 4 series on Britain’s ugliest buildings invited viewers to nominate the eyesore they would most like to see demolished they were hardly prepared for a request to flatten an entire town.

But 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.

Kevin McCloud, who will present the four-part series this year, admitted that Cumbernauld was one of the more unusual suggestions that his production team had received. “It seems they wanted the entire town to be razed for the planners to start again. This is a little further than we want to go for the programme.”

Begun in 1956 to accommodate the overspill from an expanding but rundown Glasgow, Cumbernauld’s name means “meeting of the waters”. Being built on a hill and noted for chilly draughts, it resembles more the meeting of the winds.

It was a groundbreaker in its day, with its concrete town centre on stilts designed by the architect Geoffrey Copcutt containing Britain’s first indoor shopping mall. It even won architectural awards in the 1970s when brutalism was the flavour of the decade and provided the rose-tinted backdrop to the 1981 film about puppy love, Gregory’s Girl.

Things have taken a downturn since. In 2001 it 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.

Cumbernauld’s best-known recent resident is Lewis “Scooby” Rodden, jailed for four years last week for his part in Chicago-style gang warfare between rival unlicensed security firms in west Scotland. Circumstances prevented him from giving an opinion yesterday but other residents were more than ready to mount a stout defence.

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. The residential areas are lovely, and it is a beautiful place to live.”

The team behind Demolition, the new Channel 4 series, fully intends to blow up a hated structure. They had, however, planned to destroy just a single building. A whole town might be just too much to swallow.

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