IT HAS already been named Scotland’s least attractive town — twice. Now Cumbernauld can also claim the dubious distinction of housing Britain’s ugliest building.

The town’s 1960s shopping centre, a once-futuristic fusion of glass and ramps on stilts, has topped a Channel 4 poll for the structure that people would most like to see razed to the ground.

The building in the hometown of newsreader Jackie Bird and comedian Craig Ferguson will be crowned with the unenviable honour this week in a special Christmas edition of the series Demolition.

The dubious accolade has inspired Gordon Murray, a leading Scottish architect, to draw up a blueprint which, he believes, could transform the town.

The poll drew 7,000 nominations for more than 1,000 buildings, ranging from public lavatories to power stations and included 156 concrete tower blocks. Among the 12 shortlisted as the most ugly are the £431m Scottish parliament building.

The second most hated building in Britain is the Imax cinema in Bournemouth, built in the 1990s as part of town-centre “improvements”. It opened in 2002 and closed this year.

Other eyesores nominated include the Cement Works, Rugby, the only industrial building in the final 12, and the Lodges supermarket in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, the picturesque town where the BBC filmed Last of the Summer Wine. It has remained derelict for the past eight years.

Cumbernauld, whose population is 52,000, was created in 1956 to provide an overspill settlement for workers in Glasgow. In the 1960s its futuristic architecture and social housing schemes won awards and were deemed to be an example to other communities.

However its stark designs fell out of fashion — it has been described as the “Lego fantasy of an unhappy child” and its shopping centre as a “rabbit warren on stilts” — and today it is regarded as an example of bad town planning.

As a teenage student Murray, an award-winning architect, marvelled at the radical designs of the town which was the setting for the 1981 film Gregory’s Girl which launched the careers of John Gordon Sinclair and Clare Grogan.

()He believes there is still a chance to bring life back to the centre, which has become beset with graffiti and boarded-up shops.

“I am sick and tired of people constantly having a go at Cumbernauld when they have no solution,” he said.

“I wanted to see if we could use the existing town centre, but be radical in our ideas as to how it could be brought back to life again. Do people want the whole town centre to be demolished because it has become a centre of the negativity surrounding Cumbernauld? “Knocking it down is not the solution. The existing town centre can be transformed into something positive.”

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