Townscape, trams and Gordon Cullen.

From a blog post on the now sadly defunct ScottishArchitecture.com

A tantalising glimpse of the Aberdeen we might have had...

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.

The post then discusses his return to Aberdeen in the mid-eighties when he worked on an earlier plan to cover the Denburn Valley railway and road. At the time, he also mooted re-flooding the Denburn Estuary (where motorists now 'enjoy' parking at Union Square) to create a marina-lagoon as the centerpiece to a housing development.

Of greatest fascination to us at Other Aberdeen is Cullen's interest in reversing the scrapping of the Aberdeen Trams...

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...

...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...

...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 …

Quoted text by Mark Chalmers.

Retro-futuristic