Gordon Cullen was first and foremost a Scot, who worked all over the world as a designer and architectural writer, gaining a particular reputation for solving urban problems. By the time he returned to Scotland in the 1970’s to work in Aberdeen and Glasgow, he was an old man, afflicted with cataracts born of decades peering at his trademark pencil line drawings. Yet his plans were far-seeing, and he coined the term “townscape”. He originally came to Aberdeen in the early-1970’s to plan a new town outside Maryculter first for Salvesens, the whalers turned housebuilders; then for Stewart Milne, yet although years were spent developing the proposals and lobbying, neither scheme went ahead.
Cullen returned to Aberdeen in 1985, when the Scottish Development Agency invited his consultancy, Price & Cullen, to undertake a study of the city centre. The initial brief was to examine Union Terrace Gardens, with a view to roofing over the Inverness railway line, which would mask the noise and fumes of the railway plus the new Denburn Link road, as well as increasing the size of the city’s “green lung”, and remaking connections across the valley of the Denburn. The gardens were envisaged as an urban pastoral, with green terraces to host a Grand Jatte-style picnic: dejeuner sur l’herbe, or maybe pieces on the grass. As it happens, recent proposals to relocate the Peacock Arts Centre pick up on the same concept.
Cullen recognised the importance of the Gardens, but by the time the study was presented in 1986, he had extended its scope to encompass the whole city centre. He first mooted the development now known as Union Square, by flooding the area behind Market Street in order to extend the harbour and form an artificial lagoon around which housing could be built, along the same lines as St. Katherine’s Dock in London. Union Square, in a greatly diluted form, is currently under construction. Cullen also advocated turning Castlegate back into a transport hub, pedestrianising Union Street, and regenerating the waterfront, by sowing the seed of an Oil Experience Centre on Queen’s Links.
His bravest proposal, however, was to create a tramway circuit in the city centre– and that struck a raw nerve. Gordon Cullen recognised that the considerable traffic congestion of the 1980’s could only increase– but he also saw that trams were a solution. At least two factors stymied his plan, though: the first was that the study proposed that a “major, but architecturally undistinguished department store should be relocated for aesthetic reasons”. As reported in Cullen’s biography, the chairman of the Planning Steering Group was a regional director of the aforementioned store, and resistance was felt almost immediately. One of the most important factors in Gordon Cullen’s thinking was that whatever we build should tread lightly, yet the eastern end of George Street still suffers from the presence of the former Norco Hoose, “the most architecturally challenged building in Aberdeen”.
Cullen should perhaps have disentangled the Norco idea from the tram idea, rather than letting both die together, but the second obstacle was even more intractable: the shadow of past Council policy. We know that trams work efficiently in Aberdeen as people-movers– after all, they ran for almost a century, co-existing with people, horses, steam lorries and motor cars, then finally the bus. In fact, trams are unique, since they are a tested solution rather than an untried notion. The system carried up to 17 million people a year, but in 1958, the Corporation melted down the family silver by driving all the cars out to the Sea Beach and setting them alight in a giant pyre. Aberdeen still lives with the civic shame of having destroyed dozens of sophisticated modern tramcars– many less than ten years old– which were acknowledged as being the best in Britain. You can perhaps understand why the reversal which Cullen proposed, only a generation later, would be difficult to accept.
The truth is that Aberdeen Corporation lost its nerve in the 1950’s. In 1940, Provost Mitchell expressed the conviction that although tramcars may “go by the board” some day, “that would not happen for a very long time in Aberdeen”. New tram cars were ordered from English Electric in the late 1940’s, the “Streamliners”, which attracted favourable reviews and were envied by other cities. Aberdeen had the youngest fleet in Scotland. Fashion, however, turned against the tram. English cities were giving up tramcars in favour of buses. Statistics were used to bolster the case for closure– in 1955 it was noted that 38 new trams would have been needed in Aberdeen during the following seven years, at a cost of £10000 each– yet in 1953, the tramways made a profit of £8667, whereas the Corporation buses lost £43539. That was despite bearing the costs of the new Streamliner cars which entered service in 1950. Lies, damned lies and …
The tram is clean and efficient, since it uses electricity generated in the north of Scotland by hydro-power; it can typically carry more passengers than the bus, it offers a smoother ride, and despite bus lanes, trams can sustain a greater passenger density since they accelerate faster than buses. Dundee had plans to introduce modern Continental-style articulated trams in the early 1950’s, yet by 1956 the tracks had been ripped up. Only Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow and Blackpool were left with trams after Aberdeen’s system closed; Blackpool clung onto its trams, and tellingly, Sheffield began to consider their re-introduction in the early 1970’s– little more than ten years after they had been scrapped. If the trams had only managed to hang in for another few years, fashion would have turned again in their favour.
As with so many Scottish Development Agency masterplans, Cullen’s proposals were presented, then quietly placed in a drawer and forgotten about. Yet in those same few years following the death of the tram in the late 1950’s, also went the many details which provide colour and grain and interest, the facets of Gordon Cullen’s notion of “townscape”. In George Street there was the famous oversize watch outside Kemp the jewellers– stuck eternally at 7.21– along with old-fashioned swan-necked streetlamps; a catenary of tram wires overhead; sunshades used to protect shopfronts along the south-facing side of the street; and the roadway’s patterning of granite setts, with Adamant slabs on the pavements. The matters of scale, detail, texture are what separates conducive city centres from monotonous shopping malls.
Townscape, even when it is merely a background to everyday life, is conscious that when we build for one purpose, we also build for the eyes of others. We create the fabric of the city. Cullen’s proposal would have turned the Castlegate back from a windblown desert into the transport hub which it originally was, a great urban hinge on the Bridges route. Vehicles are of course part of that backdrop– but when you think of European cities, you invariably see trams. Aberdeen, on the other hand, now suffers daily gridlock at Haudagain, the Bridge of Don, and the mediaeval Brig o’ Dee. Building more roads will only move the gridlock somewhere else for a while, it cannot reduce or remove, since more and more cars and lorries are coming in to the city. We ignored Gordon Cullen’s prophetic report, but the tram may yet have its day – although that day might well dawn in Edinburgh …
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