Dom's domus is doomed

It isn't actually. It's neighbours are, and for the moment it seems that Dom Mintoff's 'childhood home' will be spared the attention of the 'urban renewal' zealots. As such, I don't see the point of Chris Agius's crusade: the Cospicua council could just put up a sign or plaque and be done with it.

Then again, the (non-)story is a columnist's dream. Mintoff's houses have a knack of making the news. Rather like the man, they are not necessarily easy on the camera objective. If buildings wore clothes, both L-Għarix in Delimara and the house in Cospicua would be dressed in tatty army surplus anoraks. And yet, they keep us all enthralled.

There's also something very odd about the talk to save Mintoff's home from 'slum clearance'. Mintoff is not well known for having bothered too much about history (save for his dogged belief that Malta could produce its own - but that's a separate point) or the continuity of urban fabric.

Stories still circulate among Valletta's Pawlini of how the summer of 1972 brought heavy machinery to the Arċipierku neighbourhood of the city. Within days, this 'Nationalist fortress' was reduced to rubble in the name of 'slum clearance'.

Reactions were mixed. On one hand, Nationalists complained that the purge was Mintoff's attempt to break the back of the local community. Labourites, for their part, thought it pathetic that a bunch of old and dilapidated buildings should resist 'modernisation' for some fuzzy notion of heritage. Let's just say that romance was not big in Mintoff's world.

Which means that, if we were really interested in honouring the man's legacy, we would just raze what's left of his childhood home and replace it with modern and useful social housing. Preserving it implies a type of taxidermy, in which Mintoff the personage is stuffed as a historical specimen, irrespective of what he stood for.

Mintoff himself has always dreaded to be mothballed. Some have dismissed his recent antics as the symptoms of senility, but I think they also have to do with his horror of becoming a living fossil, all past and no present. So, we're damned if we consign his house to posterity, damned if we don't.

But there's another twist to the tale. In a sense, I was happy that Agius spoke out, because it was one of those very rare occasions when Cospicua is represented as a site of heritage. Most of the time the name of this town is a staple of talk of unemployment, drug use, and the rest of the litany of 'social problems'. In the rare event the words 'Cospicua' and 'heritage' are used in the same sentence, those of us who know and love the place sigh a breath of relief.

The people of Cospicua - both its residents and those many thousands who don't actually live there but whose families did - feel that their town is undervalued. They have a point. Just last week I happened to be talking to one of the most learned scholars on the island. He told me he had been to the Santa Margherita area of Cospicua for the first time, and he was amazed to have found there a fairly pristine townscape dating back a couple of centuries. 'I always thought Cospicua was all post-war social housing', he said.

That's what most people used to think of Vittoriosa. That has now changed, thanks to the excellent work of the local council, the candlelit nights, the festivals, and so on. So far, Cospicua's had no such luck.

The drama with Mintoff's house is Cospicua's little blip on the heritage screen. It's interesting, if hardly surprising, that it has to do with 'slum clearance'. Somehow, we're still using the term for drastic interventions in an historic walled city, which also happens to be an urban conservation area. Not so long ago Cospicua lost several ancient buildings to 'slum clearance', and our thinking doesn't seem to have progressed much.

Demolition and replacement of old buildings by '56 flats and garages' is hardly the right approach to heritage conservation in a historic town. That sort of thinking is synonymous with post-war fervour to 'modernise' our harbour towns by sweeping aside whole neighbourhoods and widening streets to facilitate car access. Fifty years on, Harrison and Hubbard's 'outline plan for the region of Valletta and the Three Cities' (1945) makes for chilling reading.

Rather, the words today should be 'conservation' and 'rehabilitation'. Much more expensive than swinging balls and building garages, of course, but then conservation doesn't come cheap.

The people running the church in Cospicua know this. That's why they've applied for and got, thanks in part to the work of a colleague of mine at University, a generous grant that will help them restore the building. Good news indeed, for the Kunċizzjoni church represents the historical continuity and the artistic/artisanal achievement of the people of Cospicua.

It therefore makes even less sense to go about smothering this magnificent building in a morass of flats and garages. Especially not if the given reason is 'slum clearance' which, as the Pawlini will tell you, means the removal of a way of life.

The figure of il-perit (the architect) has been synonymous with clean sweeps and building from scratch for far too long. Cospicua for one is crying out for a reappraisal. Once again, it had to be Dom.

mafalzon@hotmail.com