Guilt actor Mark Bonnar fronts documentary on new town art from East Kilbride to Cumbernauld

(As an East Kilbridean myself, I loved those elephants. They lived in my local swingpark for a while.)

Maybe you risked life and limb (or a grazed knee, at any rate) to climb the weirdly-shaped stone structures that sat in the then-uncovered Princes Square in the town centre, or recall the brightly-painted underpasses dotted around the periphery.

The strange beauty of new town art – like those elephants, or the hippos in Glenrothes, or Cumbernauld’s totem pole – is celebrated in a new documentary fronted by Guilt actor Mark Bonnar.

Meet You at the Hippos is a funny and surprisingly moving look back at the sculptures and artworks which appeared in the early days of Scotland’s five New Towns – East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingston.

It is a subject close to Mark’s heart – his dad, Stan, was one of the artists creating the works, which ranged from giant yellow irises (made by Malcolm Robertson and loaned to the Glasgow Garden Festival by Cumbernauld in 1988) to concrete mushrooms and a set of chairs and TV set.

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Stan was an assistant to Glenrothes’ first Town Artist, David Harding, in the late 1960s, before going on to become the artist for East Kilbride and Stonehouse.

“I remember driving up one of the main boulevards in East Kilbride in my new wee Volkswagen Beetle, and I was looking around, and I said – I’m going to do my best for you,” says Stan in the documentary, which is on BBC Scotland tonight at 10pm. “I had this vision that I WAS going to do my best for the people of East Kilbride. I thought, so how will I do that? I’m going to build an elephant….”

The Bonnars lived in a delapidated farmhouse outside the village of Stonehouse before moving to Murray Drive, which was one of two new streets built for the ‘new town that never was’. Plans to make Stonehouse the sixth Scottish New Town were cancelled just a few days after the launch ceremony.

In his first presenting role, and switching between an irritating, know-it-all presenter persona and his own funny self, Mark takes a trip down memory lane, and a sideways look at how Scotland’s new towns filled up with concrete animals, decorated underpasses and mysterious standing stones.

Along the way, he discovers why these Scottish new towns came to be built and how they enticed people out of overcrowded cities like Glasgow. He chats to former Town Artists David Harding, Malcolm Robertson, Mary Bourne and Denis Barns and finds out why Neville Rae, a young artist from Cumbernauld was inspired by Brian Miller, a seminal figure from the early days of his town’s creation.

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Mark also meets Rae McCulloch, a Stonehouse native and artist who is restoring the elephants Stan created in the 70s, and visits Jim Barclay’s Untitled abstract sculpture near East Kilbride’s Dollan Aqua Centre. Meanwhile, his dad goes back to East Kilbride to see the original elephants, now trunk-less and looking a little sorry for themselves, and revisits the Glenrothes hippos.

“I like the way that they’ve gone dark,” he says, visibly moved by the reunion. “They’ve taken on the colour of Glenrothes’ skies.”