Heart of Scottish Darkness

“What is it about Scotland and these wee, grey pill-box houses?”

There is something of Calvin about it: the fact of these drab flats and houses existing in a cold, dark North European country.  It’s as if they’d taken the anti-depressants off of a few architects from Scunnered and Co, put them in a room and commissioned them to ‘come up with something grim’.

Very few people know about ‘Dreich’ school of architecture and it has thrived in Scotland for quite some time. The country that has given the world Mackintosh and ‘Greek’ Thompson has also contrived these awful ‘schemes’which are liberally sprinkled across the land like mould on a beautiful painting. They are truly a blight but, amazingly, a deliberate one.

Back in the day, they shifted people out from The Gorbals and Bridgeton, out from their rat-infested fevered lumps of stone out to the outlying reservations of such as Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse but ‘forgot’ to provide them with amenities such as shops and, yes, pubs. An oversight? I think not. Punishment, more like. ‘Thou shalt not’ was at the root of this abomination.

“Thou shall not have bright, cheerful housing because you do not deserve such luxury”.

John Knox Towers in Martin Luther Gardens.

Cumbernauld won architectural awards when it was first built. I think I may have to say that again or maybe just the three words. Cumbernauld. Architectural. Awards. That grey, sodden heap of ugly shit and brickwork in North Lanarkshire won design awards. If that’s not evidence of a masonic conspiracy, I don’t know what is!

Have you ever visited Livingston when it’s raining? Don’t, unless you have sufficient quantities of Valium to hand and the other hand on some sort of return ticket to wherever you’ve come from.

There’s a town in West Lothian (where else?) named Breich which is unspeakably glum. Why they didn’t just use the ‘D’ instead of the ‘B’ is a mystery to everyone who has ever seen it, or God forbid, lived in it. It doesn’t have a ‘twin town’ but it has a suicide pact with Whitburn which has the vibrancy of Las Vegas in comparison. The sinister strains of ‘Duelling Banjo’s’ emanates from the local ice-cream van and the one pub in town ‘The Breich Bar’ doubles as a field hospital at the weekends. Seven miles from Livingston, someone tried to run there once in desperation but was captured by one of those big white balloons from The Prisoner that everyone thought was made up!