A vibrant market lets you turn a physically ugly location into something eclectic, fun and exciting. But it doesn’t work the other way round.

I happen to love markets – food markets even more than flea markets – and I am all for giving the hawkers all the space they want. Just not in Ordnance Street. Please.

You don’t need or want to camouflage a street like that. And you certainly shouldn’t want to downgrade, diminish or in any way cramp something so stylish, which works so exquisitely and beautifully on its own. It’s best served neat. Just like an expensive bottle of whisky.

Antonio Belvedere, one of Renzo Piano’s associates, likened the recent decision to making a cake and spitting on it. Perhaps not the metaphor which expresses accurately or incisively enough the type of mindset we are dealing with here.

You see, this isn’t an act of vindictiveness. In a moment of anger, anyone can spit on a cake. This, on the other hand, is chiefly about ignorance and stupidity, about being unable to distinguish the wheat from the chaff – which is infinitely worse. To me, it’s more like pouring 7-Up into an exquisite white wine.

And even if the powers-that-be did redesign the stalls and turn them into works of art, I still wouldn’t want them in Ordnance Street. Having said that, I would probably be willing to reach some sort of compromise and grant properly licensed and compliant traders access to the street one or two Sundays a month, or even weekly if necessary. But that would have to be a deal with no strings and no stalls attached. The stalls would need to go at the end of the day, along with the traders.

This has nothing to do with their design. Tacky and tasteless they may be, but that is still a secondary consideration, because in the end this is not an argument that can be won by improving on the design. Anyone who doesn’t get this is missing the point.

Years ago, when Merchants Street was upgraded and pedestrianised under a Nationalist government, I was looking forward to the prospect and was rather pleased with the overall effect. This was until they set up those makeshift table and chairs, which I continue to find rickety and regrettable.

I wouldn’t sit at one of those tables if you paid me. And if I happened upon them anywhere else in the world, they’d represent the sort of tourist trap I would avoid without hesitation.

As far as I am concerned, collapsible and temporary structures such as these, which tend to become permanent fixtures, ruin the visual impact of the streets they are meant to be embellishing.

If such stalls were tolerated on an occasional basis, the eyesore would at least be temporary and, above all, contained. The underlying integrity of the streets would be restored.

In the last year or so, my walking habits in Valletta have changed, and quite deliberately. Where once I used to rely on Melita Street as a cut through to Merchants Street or St Paul Street, today I find myself taking the longer route via Ordnance Street.

This is chiefly about ignorance and stupidity, about being unable to distinguish the wheat from the chaff

It’s a little part of Valletta which makes me feel like I’ve travelled overseas. Which is not to downplay the rest. I happen to like all of the city – the dingy, battered, cluttered and rundown parts included.

And yet there’s something serene about that short walk past the Opera House and the churches of Our Lady of Victories and St Catherine of Italy towards Castille. It’s a breath of fresh air which quite literally allows me, in turn, to breathe and to think.

The other day I had a ‘little moment’ on that street with a perfect stranger as we discussed the Arctic weather we were having, and made our shivering way to the madding crowd that is Republic Street, where we lost each other. It’s the sort of street which allows you to have that kind of serendipitous, quiet moment.

It’s the sort of street you would definitely want showcased, left free and unencumbered all year round, and spared the crowds and busy hum of commerce.

The Prime Minister is obviously underestimating (or choosing to ignore) the importance of space as everyone’s right to sanity and well-being. I really do feel that Valletta 18 could signal a new era for Malta, a time worthy of a democracy no longer tied to its colonial or knightly ‘apron’ strings.

These will be exciting times for Malta, and we have, I reckon, about three years to get our act together and become a City of Culture with the ambition to achieve world-class excellence in some areas at least. There is nothing elitist about striving for excellence.

Renzo Piano’s Parliament is incidental to the issue. Valletta is arguably one of the loveliest planned baroque cities in Europe and none of its great set-piece streets should be cluttered by raucous flea markets.

Those inclined to see this article as an undemocratic attack on a street market are also missing the point. They may invoke the Athenian Agora, or central market, as a meeting place in the birthplace of democracy, conveniently forgetting that Athenian democracy was far from inclusive and that the Agora was a carefully planned commercial centre and civic amenity, not an ad hoc market that came about by stealth or encroachment.

Ordnance Street belongs to all of us and should not be hijacked by a minority group who will change the game and spoil the essential quality of the place for the rest of us.

To lose Ordnance Street in this way would be both to diminish Valletta as a planned city and to disregard the daily lives of all those who walk its streets.

The whole point of a market is that it is properly located, ideally in a place approved by centuries of tradition, and not suddenly ‘shoe-horned’ into an expedient and apparently expendable urban thoroughfare.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com