Gzira is very heavily used by traffic and most of the buildings are stained black and grey with exhaust fumes, and this could be one of the first things that needs to be seen to.

Many of the back streets are also used as dumping areas and there are some places where, although there are skips in place, you can see rubbish literally right next to them. It could be that the skips are not being emptied regularly, or just negligence on the part of the residents.

Even the street lights are ancient. And of course, there is the prostitution problem, even though the Msida police station is only half a kilometre away.

We have already spoken about the need to upgrade product Malta, and have written articles to expose the problems in Fort St Angelo and Marsa. Like the latter two places, Gzira is very close to a tourism hub and a commercial area – Sliema. It is useless to upgrade areas of Malta and then ignore adjacent localities.

The pictures speak for themselves. The place just looks very shabby. Perhaps we could start with cleaning up the buildings in the area and clearing up the small dumping areas. Once this is done, we can actually focus on improving standards in the locality.

Another issue to tackle in Gzira could be seeing to the amount of broken and boarded up windows in many of the buildings, especially of business premises that are no longer in use.

We have seen that the government has spent hefty sums of money to upgrade and embellish a lot of areas, such as the Upper Barrakka in Valletta and St Thomas Bay, and there are many other projects still being worked on, such as the one in St George’s Bay.

But perhaps we need to pay some attention also to places where normal Maltese families could benefit from some form of project to embellish the area. The standards of business we want to expand out of Sliema will not do so unless there is a nice area to expand to.

Sometimes we must remember that it is not always easy to attract investment, and to do so, you must take into account many logistics. The state of affairs in areas such as Gzira is definitely one of them. The local council can and should give a helping hand too.