One stands amazed at this shamelessness.

Fort St Angelo, perhaps the most important post-mediaeval building in Malta has fallen into a most dreadful state of neglect, a cross between a waste disposal site and a dangerous structure, with blocks of stone ready to fall on the heads of the unwary and vegetation prizing apart the stonework: yet it was here that the Great Siege was won.

Secondly, there is the Lazaretto, the most important surviving Lazaretto in the Mediterranean, and a key to understanding the past importance of Malta, both under the Order of St John and the British Empire (see Charles Savona Ventura Outlines of Maltese Medical History – 1997 – p.30-31), with an invaluable archive of graffiti, including Lord Byron’s, that is today inaccessible, due to the developers closing off Manoel Island and which is not to be restored. Instead, this famous Lazaretto is to be demolished.

What is shameless is this. It is not that the state neglects culture and heritage but that the profitable private sector fails to engage in the preservation of Malta’s heritage in a sincere and significant way. Yet fortunes have been made by pulling down one and two storey houses of stone and putting up concrete apartment blocks and hotels that have a shelf life of 25 years – far less than those buildings that have been demolished. These new buildings deface the environment that the population – rich, poor or tourist – inhabits and inevitably lead to the rebuilding of these environmentally insolent, often taller blocks and complexes in an apparently endless and endlessly profitable and polluting construction boom.

With the millions of liri in profit, made by the construction lobby and with 30 per cent of the Maltese GDP coming from tourism, it seems both absurd and shameless that those involved in this lucrative cycle of construction companies and cooperations have not the mind to scrape together the funds to clean up, restore and preserve Malta’s heritage, such as Fort St Angelo and the Lazaretto.

Audrey Duggan

SLIEMA