In 1998, just a few days before the early general election caused by Dom Mintoff’s defiance of the Alfred Sant government over the Cottonera waterfront rehabilitation, John Dalli who in that election contested the second district, issued a poster as part of his election campaign.

In it, an architect’s visual impression, was a first attempt at seeing how the blackened Dock One area could become a tourist attraction.

Until then, the docks were behind a wall, and used by the dockyard. They were an industrial area which did not even realize it was next door to the three cities. People on both sides of the wall had no idea it could be anything different.

By then, the issue regarding the Cottonera waterfront (on the Vittoriosa side) with its political implications regarding Dom Mintoff had indeed led to the downfall of the Sant government and the September 1998 election put paid to the controversies – although Dom’s beef was more against leasing Fort St Angelo to the Order of Malta than anything else.

Soon, the idea of converting the docks area into something different emerged. The dockyard was still in existence and so people focused on the conversion of the sea area outside of the dockyard, in the direction of Vittoriosa, with the creation of a yacht marina.

Later on, under the PN administrations, plans were drawn up for the conversion of the docks area, and these gained added traction when the Malta Drydocks closed down. Then, on the eve of the 2008 election, the wall came down and the eyes of people were opened to the many possibilities the area offered. For starters, one would be able to walk all the way from Fort St Angelo round to the tip of Senglea.

Various ideas were mooted but no one could agree on one definite plan. There were, it was said at the time, various reservations on the part of Mepa as to the restoration and reuse of the buildings at the side of Dock One, known as the Knights buildings and the British buildings.

This impasse led to the government of the time focusing on the landscaping works from the Freedom Monument to the inner part of Cospicua.

Then even these works suffered a delay, for which an Italian contractor was blamed. A person even lost her life in the long-drawn out roadworks in the area.

Come the Labour administration and one prime target for Minister Joe Mizzi’s activism was the completion of the works, which were done to a timeframe that was kept.

As to the use to which the Knights and British buildings would be put to, there were some suggestions but no definite and accepted solution. The PN administration, bruised by the Renzo Piano plan for the Valletta City Gate, was not eager to kindle a new focus for opposition.

Into this gap marched Joseph Muscat in his search for a solution to the nation-wide opposition to the use of the Zonqor area for the new Jordanian-owned American university. The second part of the AUM will be in those buildings, Dr Muscat announced last week, to general rejoicing by the Cottonera people.

This is a government ‘that decides’, Dr Muscat is fond of saying and indeed his decision has cut through all the hems and the haws as to what the buildings should be used for. And there the matter rests, until we see the application being processed and the conversion done and the university coming into being.

As it is, however, one may be excused for a moment of nostalgia: one of the most fascinating ideas for the re-use of the buildings was to create a living museum promoting Malta (and especially Cottonera’s) maritime heritage in the building of vessels.

The model here would have been Greenwich, but equally other museums of the world such as in Sweden and Denmark, for example.

It is a pity that long-standing apathy on the one side and political expediency on the other lead to the burial of such imaginative and creative ideas.

Maybe Cospicua gained with the advent of AUM but maybe too it lost.