Flashback Monday: Yet Another New Town from the 60s

You'd be excused for thinking that the entire "new urbanism" movement in the 1960s consisted of Reston and its Maryland doppelganger, Columbia, emerging fully formed from the heads of their respective developers. Not true! We've already visited a stunning example of urban planning from the same era in the Irish countryside, and now, we'll take a look at an even finer exemplar of the best of New Urbanism, ca. 1968:

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Cumbernauld New Town, Scotland -- not to be confused with the Reston in Scotland, which we're sure is a lovely place with... thatched roofs and, um, kilts, and whatever else you get in Scotland. But this stunning vista marries the brutalist adornments we've come to know and love with the massive building-on-a-windswept field look that Reston Town Center had in its early days. This looks like a black and white photo, but we can assure you that it's not.

Of course, the British do warm beer snark better than we do, so here's what a Blighty "web logger" has to say about this:

For a long time I wondered what this picture reminded me of. Now I have it - it's like the colony where Ripley discovers the little girl in Aliens. A bizarre mix of hospital crematoria and the Royal Festival Hall on stilts, bear in mind that this building was under 10 years old when this photograph was taken.

Much like Lake Anne, the "grossery" was at the heart of this New Town:

Amazingly, it gets better much worse:

We have no idea what they were smoking going for in this bit of building, but it's basically a Bizarro Terraset reaching inappropriately into the sky, only without the Mole People. Also, we're pretty sure that building in the bottom right got cited by their HOA for a paint color deemed "not sufficiently soul-crushing."

Now for some deja vu:

This looks eerily like Hunters Woods in the bad old days, right down to the apocalyptic wasteland sort of feel limited foot traffic. Of course, maybe our Scottish planned community brethren would have done a better business serving drinks to people instead building a "fish and chicken bar," thank you, be sure to tip your waitress, we'll be here all week.