When world ending as opposed to world building, what do we leave behind? What detritus is left of the collective endeavours, the touch, the sight, the conjunctively lived and felt, from the time that came after the future inevitably ended? What were our shared belongings? Federico Campagna makes a good point: when choosing what to leave behind, it doesn't need to be totally objective. Maybe this experiment in building ‘a new generation’ was only ever a spectacular play schemed to teach us something?

Cumbernauld was imagined as a utopia for living. A Scottish New Town developed to ease Glasgow’s overcrowding, it was born in 1955 from the modernist belief that society could be reshaped through design. This design centred a bold architectural experiment: a monolithic Brutalist megastructure that housed a nursery, a library, penthouse flats, shops, offices, social services, restaurants, a hotel and even, latterly, two competing nightclubs, all in one labyrinthine concrete complex. Raised walkways separated people from cars; communal living was prioritised over the individual. The town centre was a vision of the future.

Yet the town centre was never completed, and underinvestment and embezzlement would catalyse the project’s failure. Concrete weathered. Services declined. Communities, displaced from Glasgow and other cities, found themselves alienated in a place where nothing quite worked. Unemployment rocketed from the late 1970s onwards, and much of the town's already struggling built environment became associated with social isolation and deprivation. The abuse of the buildings left its mark on the inhabitants. Over time, Cumbernauld became a byword for the failures of modernist planning, a symbol of dystopia rather than utopia. In 2022, North Lanarkshire Council announced plans to demolish the megastructure entirely. The demolition is scheduled for 2027 to make way for a new shopping centre. 

“Ahead of its blowing up, what was there?” Katie Shannon asks. In DEVOCORPOSTO, the artist responds to the impending erasure of her hometown with a series of laboured drawings, print, textile and metal work which she describes as “re-makes, cover versions” – of lost public imagery and civic detritus: late-night throbs of E in local nightclubs; reflections in a shop window drawn from bodycam footage taken by Shannon in the town centre. An assemblage of hand-embellished and embroidered school shirts and ties references a piece of public art in Cumbernauld’s underpass. A screenprint on the wall reproduces a gable end adorned with a state-commissioned mural of doves by Brian Miller, Cumbernauld’s appointed town artist from the 1960s to 1980s. Various shades of blue – so-called “council blue”, New Labour blue, blue collar, Le Corbusier blue – run throughout. Nearby hangs a tiny replica of the displaced St Enoch Clock, a local landmark known to always tell the wrong time, its hands etched with hardcore til I die in happy hardcore font, a popular local music genre. The clock hands are set to 3:23 am, the congregation time after a standard club closing hour.

Lying on a pile of blue folders is Shannon’s Cumbernauld Development Corporation Report 2027, a riff on the town’s real 1987 annual report, the cover of which featured a group of schoolchildren dressed in business suits with the slogan “A new generation”. Shannon identifies this moment as pivotal in Cumbernauld’s history, signalling a shift from the town’s socialist roots to new neoliberal aspirations. Alongside bodycam shots of the town centre and images of the original report, Shannon includes a portrait of Mary, fifteen, who currently lives in Cumbernauld. Mary wears a shirt and paper tie, echoing the suited youths of the original 1987 report. In his book Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (2021), Federico Campagna uses the figure of the adolescent to symbolise a state of openness and creative potential, highlighting the tension between the desire for structure and the fear of limiting possibilities. This duality reflects a broader cultural and philosophical exploration of how new worlds and meanings can emerge from the ruins of old ones. In 1987, Cumbernauld used the adolescent, a “new generation” precociously suited, as emblem of civic optimism, as hope for a future. Now, Shannon remakes this image to bridge the mood of the time with the mood of today. 

Referential and edged, at times, with a deadpan, colloquial humour, Shannon’s cover versions reanimate materials and sites of the past – social gatherings, state-commissioned murals, municipal documents, remnants of provincial music cultures – while questioning how time, memory, and place are flattened in both literal and imaginary ways in an era of digital immediacy. “Cosmologically assuming this is the end of a world (Cumbernauld) and, more broadly, of our world,” Shannon writes, “taking cue from Bifo Berardi; propagating re-engagement with shared psychological energy feels like the only ethical escape window left”. The objects and images cited, once part of a collective civic imagination and personal lexicon of daily life, are now ghost traces, residue of time that cling to the psychosphere. DEVOCORPOSTO (a title playing on Development Corporation or portmanteau high school Italian for MUST-BODY-PLACE/AFTER ) takes the death of the new town as allegory of failure, as locus for personal and collective memory, as index of displacement, of evolution, ‘de-evolution’ and the undoing of linear time; a twilight zone between real history and half-forgotten futures. “When your concrete reality is reduced to toxic dust”, says the artist, “in the end, what’s left is what sticks: the psychic sludge of a place and set of ideals once dreamt, destroyed by capital and market forces, now imploding into the landfill of time, to be re-developed into a new shopping mall.”

KATIE SHANNON (b. Glasgow, UK) is an artist based between Glasgow and London, working across drawing, installation, printmaking, textiles, writing, performance, curation, music and collaborative formats. Her practice centres on the event as medium, exploring temporalities, collective intimacy, and states of energetic unrest. Rooted in a socialist, feminist, and materially led approach, her work navigates themes of class, sociality, and counter-culture, using repurposed or 'low' materials, laboured processes, and printmaking as means of dissemination to propose alternative economies of making and meaning. Her research investigates the time codes of place as they relate to bodies, peripheral music scenes, overlooked narratives, and suspended notions of time, particularly elongated adolescence and perceived “ends”, charting ways to reposition what has been marginalised or missed. She is the co-founder of TLC23 with Keira Fox, a collaborative platform that explores performance, curation, music, and scenography to examine mania, collective panic, and filmic female archetypes during periods of instability and precarity. 

Shannon was the subject of solo shows at Celine Gallery, Glasgow (2024); Kunsthalle.Ost, Leipzig (2022); Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow (2019); The Loftus Hall, Berlin (2019); and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2019). Group shows include Corpus Gallery, Cambridge (2025 forthcoming); Gnossienne Gallery, London (2025); Plaster, London (2025); Existers, London (2025); Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2025); Carousel IV, London (2025); After 8 Books, Paris / Borgenheim Rosenhoff, Oslo (2025); Okasenjatu11, Helsinki (2024); The Horse Hospital, London (2024) curated by Tai Shani and Anne Duffau; The Artist Room, London (2024); South Parade, London (2024); NEVEN, London (2024); The Horse Hospital, London (2023); Original Projects, Great Yarmouth (2023); French Place, London (2022); CCA, Glasgow (2022); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2020). Selected performances and TLC23 actions include Somerset House, London (forthcoming 2025); TINA, London (2024); Dortmund Kunstverein, Dortmund (2024); Cafe Oto, London (2023); The Horse Hospital, London (2023); Le Bourgeois, London (2023); Sonica Festival, Tramway, Glasgow (2022); 103 Skopje Radio, North Macedonia (2022); Radio Vilnius, Lithuania (2022); The 343, Belfast (2019); Platform, Glasgow (2019); Riva Tunnel, Monaco (2019); Late at Tate Britain, London (2019); Kunstraum, London (2019); CCA, Glasgow (2018); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2018). Shannon co-runs record labels and gig series, including Domestic Exile, So Low, and Rebi, and has a radio residency on NTS Radio. Shannon graduated with an MFA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2024.

Ahead of the demolition of the structure I’ve inhabited longer than any other (with much fascination, veering on a compulsive obsession), what happened, and why?

Slow culmination of fact and feeling maps a subjective, hagiographic history of its being: intermittent discoveries with Wiebke, the archivist at the North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre; seeking out generations of wet street furniture to enjoy, bare arsed; undertaking regular bodycammed, off grid tours (it’s illegal to photograph or film in the town centre, you will be chased by security).

I’ve been trying to contend what the loss of a place with personality might mean for a community and its mood, and how to oppose the associated sickness of being forced to live in an expanded parking lot of low-end chain stores. I worry that this imminent destruction, crass and violent, could create more characters in Berardi’s non-fiction Heroes: people hurting each other and themselves. We share something oddly unique and arguably beautiful here. This building is an identity for an entire town, which would alternatively be dominated by Asda Extra. 

Just hanging around, no-one quite knows what time it is here or how to deal with the death that looms. The town centre was designed for ‘youth’. Simultaneously, whilst making this show, I was in the midst of a period of psycho-reconsideration of my own mortality. Kind of serendipitous? Reality planes melted together. How can you be expected to know where and when is right now, to live conjunctively when the hidden clock perennially tells the wrong fucking time. This out-of-jointness creates a time lag and the shared mood reverts back to impatient adolescence. The demolition date moved from 2025 to 27 and, maybe, true to a lifelong failure to stick to deadlines, the end of Cumbernauld town centre will never come. In the meantime, perhaps a shared feminist re-reading of space (and time) could help shift popular opinion?

PEDFETCTC1

Recently, I received a flurry of texts, 

‘I’m so sorry Katie, are you okay?’ 

‘Omg I can’t actually believe this is happening’ 

‘They can’t fucking do this, let’s chain ourselves to her’ 

In usual circumstances, this might have been some call-out message from a friend or relative about a matter of care, often related to some lifestyle dysfunction or perhaps, if the latter, something more of a [longed-for] intimate kink sensibility. But, on this day, these texts referred to the announcement of the imminent destruction of Cumbernauld Town Centre, a Brutalist megastructure and the UK’s first indoor shopping mall. The heart of my teenage home/ town/ heart; quite literally so; every arterial underpass, flyover and A road dotted with roundabouts (Le Corbusier hated traffic lights) leads to ‘the Toony’. The glands are still beating along, although now not quite so pumping; blood flow has been in decline for some time. Whether you adore or loathe her, it’s impossible not to have some connection to this debatably beautiful monolith. There, visible across the ‘skyline’, she dominates, looms and watches over all of us below, both top-heavy and awkwardly out of place against the gentle green hills which incline where the carparks end. 

The local hotel (a Travelodge: the site of too many young girls’ nightmares) boasts ‘panoramic views of Cumbernauld’, with a Police station to one side, an Asda Extra to the left, transplanted on the edge of what is arguably the roughest scheme in Scotland (Carbrain), a McDonalds drive through to the right, and the jobcentre ‘plus’ on the arse-end, straddled so conveniently next door to Iceland. These stations frame the iconic Cumbernauld Town Centre (CTC). In lieu of any art galleries or cultural institutions, it really feels like the only attraction in town. Other forms of community space such as the youth club (closed in the mid-2000s; deemed too dangerous) and most social clubs, have disappeared, with the exception of ‘The Legion’, which, for obvious socio-political-religious divides, may only ever be monolaterally attended. 

As an attraction, she has had a tumultuous history, showered with accolades in her younger years, notably the 1967 award for community architecture from the American Institute of Architects. Princess Margaret even called the Town Centre ‘fabulous’ by first-hand account.. At some point in the 70s, a group of students from the Bauhaus were comically sent on exchange to live within, the other classmates gifted a far sunnier trip to Marseille. Cumbernauld was officially a spot on the world’s map. There was much hope for this entity in her era’s new-newness, with the New York Times once particularly enthused, writing ‘just virgin fields and white sheets of paper’ (eerily adding to the femme personification I feel of her). She’s attired for a Communion or perhaps it’s her wedding gown, preparing to be presented in sacrifice to a higher patriarch. Fast forward a few decades and this analogy sounds totally out of tune. The excessively numerous greeting card and charity shops, with wheelchair posts reeking of old age and ill health, coupled with the visible regular bulldozing of unpopular appendages she has endured. A deep rot has set in, and this rotten damp gushes. 

In short, the big, Brilliant idea of the ‘New Town’ was to plonk a population in a recently renovated field … and see what happened. Therefore, the identity of this place was fabricated; it was formed, almost shop-bought (from Bison kit homes), but this building technique had yet to be perfected [i.e., government funding was embezzled via dodgy manufacturing]. During a 2014 obsessive root through the town’s archives, I pulled out the only and original copies of resident board complaint letters with 35mm photographs attached. Peeling wallpaper, rotting crevasses, uncontrollable black mould and the fear of death when entering home by loss of the highrise’s giant pebbledash, which was idiotically never properly glued on, were amongst the main complaints. I can personally attest to this structural damage; the skin-crawling sensation of attempting to sleep on a mattress simultaneously soggy and itchy will never leave me. Further research showed the residents’ boards were assured these issues would be brought up at the Cumbernauld Development Corporation’s board meetings. Analysing 30 years of AGM minutes, it’s evident that, sadly but unsurprisingly, their complaints were never heard. No wonder there is a suspected case of BPD. 

On recent return trip, I traverse after a few too many the familiar clip-clop into her epicentre. Through the concrete covered unofficial ‘smokers bit’ … stumbling past the pub, the bookies and the chippy the disarray becomes presently apparent. Cigarette ends, which also feel cancerously old-fashioned [but still have that authenticity?], patina desperately strewn, buckets lain in every corner (I counted 49 on my last clip clop-clop…clop). I am using the term ‘bucket’ loosely here; it’s more recycled chip fat tins from The Fryary [£2.90 p/h wages], a baby pink wash basin from the daycare, some antiquated industrial steel cooking vats and empty 5-litre mayonnaise containers.

Yet, her wide, wet corridors provide a cavernous escape. The dim orange lights of the ‘old bit’ warm the mood, and the same Alanis Morissette CD has been playing over the tinny Tannoy since the mid-90s, providing a sense of stability. Not quite chromed metal window sills are always cold, and when breathed on, the slight imperfections in the glass become visible, condensation highlighting the miniature rebar grids caught within. Mirrored in varying dimensions across the structure, this caging provides a feeling of safety. Leaking, weeping, squirting from its every orifice, the trickles leave a rusted yellow stain; maybe it’s just piss.

Heading downwards to her undercarriage is a trial. The lifts are most often controlled by 7 to 11-year-olds who allow access only to their personal cohort. Luckily, four stories of wrap-around ramping remain intact, a useful hangover built for the baby strollers of the first round of population stimulus, now reappropriated by the mobility scooter.Glancing past the aspirational fugue of her affliction, it’s easy to see why the air tastes difficult; it’s visibly thick. That despondent new labour council blue, not quite navy lines, the walls painted over two thirds high to imperial measurement, missing a picture rail it camouflages ‘the other bookies’, William Hill, unusually set into the exterior wall facing the motorway, so cruelly exposed bare to the West of Scotland elements at the worst possible angle; placing your acumulator feels more like mountaineering which is arguably good for the local economy. Petrol and burnt rubber spent by the not-so-boy racers in their cousin’s Subaru Impreza-ing, 14-year-olds waiting in the back seat, satisfying mixes with dripping smog. 

Huff.

Plaster Magazine