All The Shops Along The Way
I remember some long forgotten shops in Cumbernauld Town Centre
1. I remember all my favourite shops.
A single perfect memory is the brain’s version of a screenshot. Memories, however, aren’t silent or perfect like a photograph on screen. They play loudly in the background, sounds and noise captured and kept for decades, souvenirs of a long trip. Sometimes, looking back, I’ve realised that my favourite memories aren’t big life-defining moments, but the small moments of me wandering through shops, looking around, trying to find something, anything. Shopping is a uniquely personal journey. For me, wandering through the Town Centre was an escape. The actual physical locations of my favourite shops are a deeply rooted presence in my memory. Instead of the swing park in Craigieburn Road, where my friends went, I would head up to the library. The journey, of course, wasn’t straight. There were always detours, steep paths that led to other parts of Cumbernauld Town Centre, but there were plenty of shops along the way, chances to explore. Even if I had no money, I had time, so looking at things I couldn’t buy didn’t feel like a waste. Scotch Corner (which later became Beatties), Price Invaders, Our Price, The Scan, John Menzies, The Kopper Kettle, Megabyte, Video Express, Metropolitan, Gateway, Dixons, Radio Rentals, B&Q, and that nameless little bargain shop where The Kestrel used to sit, both replaced by a gym I’ll never use. Somehow, it became part of my daily routine to check into each of these shops, visiting them like a royal dignitary, all hail me, the great Kirkland, king of bugger all. The only thing I spent in the shops was time.
2. Aunty Moira
The most glamourous woman I’ve ever known is my Aunty Moira. In reality, my grandmother’s younger sister, but we always knew her as Aunty. A model without a runway, she turned everywhere else into her catwalk, including the sloping concrete ramps of Cumbernauld Town Centre. For years, she worked in a shop called Bows. This was well before my time, but I’m assured the Cumbernauld branch was often busy and plenty of people used it to fill their council homes with furniture. Bows sat across from the old Scottish Gas shop, which I do remember, because my mother sent me up with her gas card every week. The gas shop for mum on a Thursday, The Vineyard for dad on a Friday (he was a benevolent boozer). My Aunty loved working in Bows, staying for a few years until it shut down. When asked her biggest memory of the Town Centre in those days, she doesn’t hesitate. “It was bloody freezing,” she told me, shivering like she felt the cold again. Overall though, her experience was a good one. However, I can’t help but think a shop dedicated to selling just one thing seems like a strange business to start. I’ve been raised in an era of department stores and supermarkets. Bows, The Do It Yourself Shop, and The Vineyard were all popular, busy, essential parts of the Town Centre, full of memories and flashbacks – but they couldn’t really exist these days. Everything they sold, their specialist wares, are all available on Amazon. It might cost less to buy things, but the real price to pay can be seen in any high street or shopping centre. Take a look around Sauchiehall Street and see the impact of austerity, recession, Brexit, and the internet. There are just a handful of shops, the streets are paved with cracks, and it all feels like an assault course. Nothing at all like Bows, where presentation and standards meant something, even in what ended up becoming Scotland’s ugliest building. For my Aunty, Bow’s wasn’t just a job. It was where she found friends, a good job among a few bad ones, and a place she won’t forget. Every other job she did afterwards has been compared to Bow’s and none of them
3. Dimensions In Time/Radio Rentals
Radio Rentals might sound like a strange shop for a child to visit during his rounds, but I was fascinated by television, one of the great loves of my life. Another great love is Doctor Who, so when Children In Need did a special one-off episode in 3D, I knew my only priority would be the prerequisite glasses. Radio Rentals was one of the few shops that had them available. Rushing up, ignoring all the shops along the way, I ran into the shop unit and squealed for my free glasses. Now I’m sure the women felt sorry for a child who found the thought of 3D television the most exciting thing in the universe, but I couldn’t help myself – even now I’m weirdly fixated on stupid things, but I’ve often found the stupid things in life make me happy. A new flavour of Monster Munch, buying multiple copies of the same book because I like the new cover art, 3D glasses even though wearing them spin my eyeballs in opposite directions. That sort of thing. The one thing that never occurred to me back in the nineties, not even once, was the fact people used to rent their televisions and radios. The mere existence of a brand like Radio Rentals (the clue is in the name, folks) would have been unbelievable to me. How did that even work? “Hello, I’ve come to see you about renting a television.” Bizarre! But I love the thought of it, yet another stupid thing that makes me happy. I wonder if my beloved television, the same one that helped me fall in love with Doctor Who, Dark Season, Top of the Pops, Rapido, Batman, Cluedo, and Poirot was rented at the time. I know for a fact my mother used a coin operated telly because the damn thing used to cut out during Neighbours. Anything, including a Radio Rentals television set, was possible in my house.
4. Mary, Mugler, and The Market
My brattiest moment was telling my mother I couldn’t wear school uniform because I was allergic to polyester. Seriously, that’s what I said. “You’ll just have to buy me some designer gear,” I informed her in my most imperious vocal, while we walked to the Town Centre. Sadly, there was no chance of finding designer gear in Mary’s, the iconic unit in the old market, where every child in town had to get their uniform. Yes, I could find plenty of other bargains, but no designer couture. There was more to the market than clothes, of course. There was a fishmonger, a branch of Remnant Kings, a weird stall where you bought parts for your Hoover (including bags), a key cutter/shoe repair shop, and a window where you bought sweets, though it later became a florist – or was it the other way around? All I know is that I bought sweets, not flowers. Anyway, I ended up at Langland’s Primary the next week in a polyester uniform, doubtless seething at being made to wear Mary instead of Mugler.
The market had a record shop too as well as a larger florists than the one that took over the sweetie shop corner unit. By my time, the record shop was all but gone, replaced by a few CDs, before the shop transformed into a place full of bric-a-brac, selling the sort of ornaments you’d see on your granny’s fireplace. It wasn’t for me, of course. Too difficult to dust properly.
5. The Scan
Outside of The Library, the Scan bookshop was something of a sanctuary, a place to hide. By the time I really got to know the place, it had already shrank. The children’s section where the Doctor Who/Three Investigators/Point Horror books were found felt cluttered a rarely used. There was an upstairs section at some point, a café full of Kunzle cake. I curse the day I never got to eat any of it. Rent hikes meant keeping a bookshop going in Cumbernauld Town Centre was no longer viable. A great loss occurred and I honestly don’t think the building has been the same since. Sometimes, looking at old photographs, I get a real sense of loss. The absolute mismanagement, the squandering of potential, but mostly, the lack of foresight. I’d heard a rumour that for a long time, certain shops weren’t paying rent because of the state of the building. If only The Scan had been allowed to maintain a presence under a similar deal! Then again, this is just hearsay, and maybe even a lie created to explain why certain shops in the Town Centre still remain when all their customers have apparently vanished. Regardless, The Scan is one of those rare shops that everyone seems to remember, always for a good reason. My great regret in life is that The Scan closed before my novels were published. I always wanted to see Happiness Is Wasted On Me in The Scan, but dreams aren’t enough to defeat inflation and his close ally the rent hike. Stirling and Falkirk have book shops in their high street and Cumbernauld deserves one as well, not just for me or my authorial ego, but because shops are far more than the goods they sell. In a shop, I feel in control. In a book shop, I feel at home.
6. Money
Popular myths became public truths. For instance, if you randomly asked someone what shops the Town Centre had, they would likely say something like pound stores and card shops. In reality, they wouldn’t be wrong. Cumbernauld Town Centre has a lot of pound stores and card shops, but even they’re starting to struggle against the world outside the sliding doors. There is, however, something else the Town Centre has in abundance. Banks. For years, we had at least five branches of the major high street banks. The Royal Bank of Scotland, TSB, Clydesdale Bank,Abbey National, and The Bank of Scotland. Now, they’re gone. In some ways, it makes sense. How we navigate our finances have changed along with how we shop. Sadly, even the banks don’t get business these days. I’ve always used The Bank of Scotland, which was a large branch even by their standards. It was so big it had two entrances at two different sides of the building. One side led off from the ramp, a cash machine built into the wall. The other entrance was opposite a branch of Capital and good old City Bakeries. All gone. Even the space is locked off. The rest of my family were part of The Royal Bank of Scotland. I declined, because I wanted a free squirrel toy, so plastic tat is the reason I went against tradition. Recently, branch closures mean there’ll be one less bank in Cumbernauld Town Centre. The Bank of Scotland, however, continues in a new location at the far side of The Antonine Centre. For how long, I can’t say. If current trends continue, it might not last into the next decade.
7. The Fruit Shop
The Fruit Shop (actually Food Fayre but no-one called it that) was a place I only went if forced. The only time I ate fruit was when it came in a lemon tart, which was more than enough to stop the scurvy from progressing. I remember the shop well because it was my era, really. Reluctantly, I’d accompany my mother up the Town Centre, lured by the promise of a trip to Wimpy or Price Invaders, only she kept stopping to talk to people she knew, her little hello, how are you? turning into huge conversations about what happened at Sax at the weekend. Christ, I hated it. Then she’d spent too much time rummaging around in boxes, looking for ripe fruit, even though I couldn’t tell the difference between an avocado and an apricot. “That’s because your favourite fruits come out a tin,” my mother hissed. This happened once a week, at the very least. I was difficult to feed. Weirdly, this memory has stuck with me, often popping by to say hello on those rare occasions I find myself strolling through the produce aisle of Tesco with my mother. Only now the phrase, “I’ve heard the fruit and meats in Aldi are the best you can get,” is constantly uttered instead of pithy comments about tinned fruit. Like most of the shops I grew up around, The Fruit Shop is gone, but there are still fruit shops dotted around, starting off as stalls, only being promoted upwards to a full sized unit with doors and shutters if enough people want their five a day.
8. Food/Lost Media/Olga’s Boutique
I suppose there was too many bakeries in the building back when I was a child. This still happens today, only all the bakeries are different branches of Greggs. In the ’70s and ’80s, however, different companies were able to thrive despite being in talking distance of competition. Note: I would have said walking distance, but bear in mind my mother made walking almost impossible, so talking distance is a better descriptor. There was Dalziels of Airdrie. Two, branches actually. There was the aforementioned City Bakeries. Then there was Crawford’s, who didn’t just have the best cakes, but also a staircase blocked off to the public. Tantalisingly, it was in the middle of the shop with a little metal gate across it, open only to staff. Customers could literally look over and down into the stairwell. In my imagination, those steps led to brilliantly weird worlds that couldn’t be accessed by mere mortals, only the magical descent could take you there. In reality, it was just the staff room and a toilet. All those bakeries are long gone, along with the units and shopfronts that used to be brightly lit and accessible. Whole areas are locked off, some of which I later explored, soon to be gone forever – unless, of course, you have photographs, or the next best thing, good memories. The North Lanarkshire Archives are available if you want to look deeper into the shops you remember, and the ones you didn’t know existed. For me, the holy grail has to be Olga’s Boutique, a groovy shop in the late ’60s that sold the hippest clothes. I’ve seen footage of it, just a quick clip, but it looks like Barbarella’s bedroom – silvery, glitzy, UFO chic, except in this instance, UFO stands for Unwearable Fabulous Outfits. Also lost are all the shops up on the third floor. Chinese takeaways, a fish ‘n’ chips place, a barber shop, possibly a pub. The Cumbernauld News was on the third floor, then the second, now that’s gone too. Thankfully, The Dragon Palace and the Lucky Garden still exist in their original places. I’m not sure Cumbernauld would be a proper new town if it didn’t have Dragon Palace and Lucky Garden.
Copyright North Lanarkshire Council. UT-177-4(73).jpg. Original photograph is held at North Lanarkshire Archives in the records of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation.
9. Evolution is killing the high street
Changes in technology transform shopping and our experiences in shops. I’ve never been able to find photographs of the various VHS rental stores that were dotted around Cumbernauld Town Centre, but I remember them well. They were my clubhouses when the library was closed. There was one roughly situated where The Sacramental Tattoo Family unit is right now (except that’s empty as they’ve left the building), but not quite in that space. It was far bigger. There was, of course, Video Express at the top of the escalators, which exists in some pictures, but just an inch of sign rather than anything in the actual shop. I remember them well, because my babysitters were Freddy, Jason, and Michael. I often forgot to rewind tapes, which often caused tuts and raised eyebrows. These places were inextricably linked to changing fortunes in home recording technology. Betamax, then VHS (which was cheaper and easier to rent out), meant everyone could go and take out a video for the weekend. As video became obsolete, the rental shops threw their lot in with DVD. This kept them relevant to the high street, at least for a while, but it must have been like putting a plaster on a gunshot wound. Rental shops don’t exist anymore because technology made them obsolete. It threatens to put cinemas out of business, which would be a terrifying prospect. Cumbernauld has had no luck with cinemas though. There was the County Cinema, where the bingo used to be, and now we have a sort of cinema at Cumbernauld Theatre. I’m not sure how much to do with streaming that is, or if people prefer going out to the cinema, meaning they’ll go somewhere else that isn’t on the doorstep.
Attempts at getting a Cumbernauld cinema off the ground have traditionally never amounted to much. So what happens if the space that could usually become a rental shop or a cinema suddenly cease to have any function? Most likely, they’re replaced by other businesses, such as supermarket chains and vape shops. Video shops had distinctive personalities, so having multiple businesses never felt wasteful in the same way half a dozen vapes shops might, because we consumed the technology, it didn’t consume us like it does now. My favourite shops today give me the same feeling I used to get in my favourite places back in ’80s/’90s Cumbernauld Town Centre. Ultimately, I learned what I liked from wandering around those shops. Shopping, the experience of it, forms an intrinsic part of your identity. It certainly did with me. Though I can’t tell stories about shoplifting in Wryggs (like my sisters), I have my own quieter, more contemplative moments, like finding my first Roald Dahl in The Scan, or (as I’ve already mentioned) trying to find 3D glasses to watch Doctor Who again on BBC1.
10. Repeating the past at the self-service
If, like me, you were an imaginative child, you probably had a tendency to romanticise the world around yourself, which is a useful skill to have when the world around yourself is full of concrete and cracks. Not once did it occur to me that Cumbernauld Town Centre was actually deeply ugly until years later when I looked with the clearest perspective and realised once and for all that the place I’d been so fond of no longer existed. All the shops I’ve mentioned in this blog are gone, now screenshots of the brain, or some really old photographs that ended up at the archive. Only The Library remains and once The Centre is knocked down, it’ll be moved elsewhere, a new lease (literally) of life. At some point, I became unhealthily obsessed with the imprint left in all those old shops, hollow concrete shapes with metal shutters that were once filled with people and hopes and ambitions. They were our lives. We added them into our daily routines. When they went away, we found new places to visit, and still do to this very day.
Copyright North Lanarkshire Council. Original photograph is held at North Lanarkshire Archives in the records of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation.
Copyright North Lanarkshire Council. Original photograph is held at North Lanarkshire Archives in the records of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation.
Until this blog, I don’t think I truly appreciated how much hope people had for Cumbernauld Town Centre. But what is any shopping mall but a shell? It’s the shops inside that make it something to boast about. At one time – yes, I swear – Cumbernauld had a branch of Woolco, a successful addition to a town that held itself above every other new town. Celebrities visited for record and book signings. The stories people have told me! My story isn’t that good. I got lost in Woolworths searching for Hordak’s Evil Horde Slime Pit and I’d forgot about it until I found an old photograph of Woolco. Sometimes, I buy things that ten year old me couldn’t afford at the time, just to show him how far I’ve came. And yet physically, I’m still in the Town Centre, working at The Library, while continuing a career writing novels that are in bookshops around the country, which is apt considering I found my first book in a bookshop. If my life is my story, and memories are the chapters, well…there’s a shop in every single one of mine. Years later, most of my favourite places are in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Stirling. Cafes, shops, takeaways, libraries – everything I grew up with, spiritually and physically relocated, like I’m trying to recreate all the places I’ve been with all the shops along the way.
All photographs on this blog are copyright of North Lanarkshire Council and held at North Lanarkshire Archives in the records of the Cumbernauld Development Corporation. I say this to let readers know that sticking these on Facebook and pretending they took them (like someone did with my photos a few months ago) is really annoying. Just pop on here and look at them, or go to the archives. They’re available to everyone.
Kirkland Ciccone
autobiographical, Blog, Books, Cumbernauld, Happiness Is Wasted On Me
90s, architecture, betamax, books, Brutalism, Cumbernauld, Cumbernauld Town Centre, history, local-history, News, Reading, shops, travel, vhs, video