The paving work in Merchants Street and St John Square is almost ready some days ahead of schedule, even though a bureaucratic mix-up caused a few months’ delay. But the way the work was done and the end result are far better than what took place when Republic Street was re-paved.
That was in 1998, when Labour was in office and when Valletta was the cultural capital of Europe from June onwards.
On 24 October 1997, Minister Charles Buhagiar announced a competition for a design of the paving. Target date for completion was June 1998, and trenching works were to be over by December 1997.
An exhibition of the proposed designs was opened on 10 December 1997 and it was also announced the project would also include the upgrading of City Gate, the bus terminus and the Triton Fountain. There was also a short-term proposal by the Planning Authority for the Opera House site.
On 21 December it was announced that Architecture Project had won the competition.
Work began, stopped for Christmas, and continued after the New Year celebrations.
By 6 April the paving slabs had not yet been purchased. A week later, the government admitted it was running late and would not make it by the beginning of June.
Furthermore, problems had cropped up with the reservoirs in front of the Law Courts and parts of Freedom Square had to be expropriated due to legal problems regarding title to the land.
In a panic, Charles Buhagiar tried to get the workers to continue during the night but Valletta was in a mess. The porfido slabs arrived in Malta on 20 May and although Prime Minister Alfred Sant opened the festivities on 2 June, the actual paving work began the next day and ended after a fashion on 30 June with a street party held on 3 July.
Yet, one could say that as usual in Malta, the work still lacked finishing: the minister blamed the shop owners for not cooperating, the shop owners blamed the government for not putting in the grates they had paid for. A report in In-Nazzjon said that too much pressure on the Maltese and Italian workers had resulted in shoddy work. In some places, limestone was used instead of coralline limestone and even people like Reno Calleja and Joe Brincat criticised the shoddy work.
By then, the Labour government was in its death throes but Charles Buhagiar still managed to unveil a plaque celebrating the end of the work, when that work was still not completed. The grates were only fixed at the end of the year, under a new PN government, and by the next year, for all the talk that the Carnival floats would not be allowed to pass on the new paving, they were allowed with the proviso that they fix a canvas net under the trucks to absorb leaking oil or diesel.