Building Modern Scotland: Planning, Architecture and Life in the New Towns

The lecture 'Building Modern Scotland: Planning, Architecture and Life in the New Towns' by Dr Alistair Fair (University of Edinburgh) is organised by Department of History of Art and Architecture (TCD).

His paper will draw on the work of a Leverhulme Trust-funded collaborative project about the social and architectural histories of the Scottish new towns, involving researchers from Edinburgh and Glasgow universities. Drawing on archival investigation and new oral history, it will offer a new perspective on the new towns, and on the broader history of modern architecture and planning as it played out in post-war Scotland. The paper will situate the new towns within an evolving policy context dating from the 1930s onwards, before turning to look at what was planned and built. In this respect, although the new towns offered space for experiment – notably in Cumbernauld town centre’s megastructural design and in the design of public buildings such as churches – these places also represent a broader though often overlooked ‘mainstream modernism’, low-key but intended to be exemplary. Finally, the paper will examine residents’ lived experiences, which will inform broader concluding consideration of what the new towns reveal of the nature of the evolving post-war settlement.