According to a presenter of Changing Rooms (the TV programme where a room is transformed on an unbelievably small budget), who is now filming what are regarded as old-fashioned holiday spots like Malta for The Holiday Show, Malta’s uniqueness lies in the fact that our story is rock, our look is rock.
To quote him precisely from an interview in The Times on Saturday: “I wanted to make a really interesting programme about Malta’s history, and its particular story. And in this case we discovered that the story is rock.”
By this he means that the Maltese islands look so extraordinary because of the prevalence of stone, which in our case equals low-rise buildings. He found this to be a great attraction and further commented: “You are so used nowadays to seeing places that are bullied by skyscrapers and huge shopping centres. You don’t get that in Malta. It is a very romantic, seductive place.”
Hopefully he hadn’t drunk too many glasses of Meridiana wine when he said that. It’s nice to hear of someone reasonably discerning coming over and finding Malta overwhelmingly charming. That kind of impression may be around, but it certainly doesn’t get into our media in general, and our newspapers in particular, where far too many negative stories prevail, and people are just switching off the News as a consequence, or just looking at the pictures and the headlines and not bothering more than that!
Perhaps he should also talk to all those who are convinced that our non-housing shortage can be solved by high rise buildings, and have literally bullied their way into making us accept that certain areas at least will in the future be zoned for high-rise. This will only be the thin end of the wedge because once we accept high-rise in, say, Qawra, Sliema and Marsascala, the whole island – except our older urban cores – will soon, domino-like, collapse before our very eyes, and cause untold nuisance to our ears, eyes and general well-being.
I do think pushing high-rises in Malta will be a very bad mistake, and I have been writing against this prospect for ages. People in favour merely make the simple, silly, superficial statement that land is in short supply, so high-rise is needed. Well it may be needed one day, but with so many of our buildings empty, with so many of our new developments left unsold for a variety of reasons – but most of all because we have an oversupply of housing anyway – we certainly do not need high-rise any time soon.
More worryingly, there is currently over-supply, particularly in the three-bed sector, with estate agents and others clamouring for more one and two-beds that the market and certain policies are not helping to supply. It seems baffling that with an over-supply of three-beds, we are, for example, insisting that areas like Swieqi can now only be redeveloped to provide three-beds.
But back to high-rise. I’m not against it aesthetically. High rise is not, of course, ugly in New York or Chicago. It is stunning, inspiring, breathtaking. But high-rises in Malta will, and are already starting to, ruin the look of the place, and since tourism is our life blood, or a bit less than that, according to AD’s Edward Fenech, and we have already lost so much of our look already, we should think long and hard before transforming Malta into another Benidorm or similar.
High-rise means concrete. Low-rise can mean stone, and it is our stone that saves us. There are so many gross buildings here, but even the most aesthetically challenged local architect can get away with design murder if he is working in stone. That is partly why so much of modern Malta looks so unsightly. Architects with no sense of good design got away with it in the past with stone, but with concrete their errors are magnified.
Still, at least Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, flamboyant presenter of Changing Rooms and now The Holiday Show, hasn’t noticed. He is obviously one of many Englishmen and women who could be persuaded to return to Malta that is, according to him anyway, such a unique location for the Brits – a place where everything is so foreign and where English, or at least “Minglish” is spoken too. Perhaps our very new and a mite over-active MTA chairman wants this guy on his now empty board...
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