Last week, a troop of locals marched up to the Cospicua local council to complain about the noise and grit-blasting pollution coming from the Palumbo docks. Their point is not that the shipyard should be dismantled and the place planted over as a Japanese garden. Rather, they feel that Palumbo regularly and far exceed the waterline of what people can reasonably be expected to put up with.

They’re right, and it’s not just about Cospicua. The shipyard’s emissions have a much broader reach and affect Senglea, Vittoriosa, and even substantial chunks of Fgura, Floriana and Valletta. Senglea is particularly badly hit, possibly more so than Cospicua, in fact. I honestly don’t know how the people who live on the shipyard side of Senglea, and whose windows overlook the docks, manage to survive at all.

The reason why Cospicua makes the news single-handed is complicated. Part of it is historical; the shipyard is still referred to as ‘it-tarzna ta’ Bormla’ (the Cospicua shipyard), even though the ships and cranes have long left the heart of town around Dock Number One. The rest probably has to do with that the residents of Senglea have given up completely, while Ġirbin (Vittoriosans) and their council are under a general anaesthetic administered by knights and prissy waterfronts.

Be that as it may, it’s not the existence of the shipyard that’s in the balance here. Rather, it’s good sense. There are at least two reasons why the shipyard is an asset to the harbour towns.

The first is aesthetic. I actually find industrial landscapes rather easy on the eye, in the manner of Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964). As the director once said of the film, “even factories can be very beautiful... The line, the curves of factories and their smokestacks, are perhaps more beautiful than a row of trees – which every eye has already seen to the point of monotony.”

Cottonera is special even by these high standards. What I particularly like about it is the contrast, the juxtaposition of form, colour, and texture that comes about when the sea, bastions and houses, and painted and rusting steel meet. In some parts of Cospicua and Senglea the docked ships are so cheek by jowl that they appear to merge seamlessly into the streetscapes.

It’s an elemental kind of beauty which will never make it to the postcard racks and which is as far from a facile quaint as one could possibly imagine. That to me is a good thing.

There’s a second reason why the shipyard is of value, in principle at least. The last thing I would like to see is a Cottonera sanitised by some vacuous programme of gentrification – or, as someone put it, one ‘domesticated by cappuccino’. Nothing is more sterile and comatose than an obsessively signposted townscape of manicured stone façades and rows of cafes where the only thing that varies is the choice of herbal teas.

The antidotes to that spine-chilling prospect include social diversity (commonly known by such terms as ‘ħamalli’ and ‘social cases’) and, tellingly, working industrial waterfronts. Put simply, the presence of the shipyard sees to it that Cottonera doesn’t become another toytown.

One might argue that one could still do without and that it is quite possible to gentrify in such a way as to respect the past and pay homage to the soul (but not the body) of a place. I suppose the new Cospicua waterfront project tries to do just that, what with its strategically-placed bits and pieces of machinery apparently rescued from the defunct Dock Number One.

Except for two things. First, it’s fairly depressing to see those bits and pieces, and what they are supposed to represent, planted there among the turf and frozen as ‘heritage’ (a word I find increasingly irritating, for various reasons).

Second, a steam boiler, say, only makes sense when it actually produces steam which passes through real pipes to make real things move for a real practical purpose. Subtract the context and the boiler becomes just another artefact. The turf sees to it that it never quite becomes art.

The presence of a working industrial waterfront enriches rather than threatens the urbanity of Cottonera. That presence includes things like sound. For example, I really miss the old siren, which until Palumbo took over was such a fixture of the soundscape. Makes me wonder what Valletta would be like without its church bells.

The shipyard’s emissions have a much broader reach and affect Senglea, Vittoriosa, and even substantial chunks of Fgura, Floriana and Valletta

The point is that there are several good reasons why the people of Cottonera might want happily to co-exist with the shipyard. They have, in any case, always done so, and to lecture them on the matter would be to insult them.

Which brings me to my take on this whole ongoing business of noise and grit-blasting emissions. The argument isn’t that the shipyard should go, or even that it is a necessary evil. Rather, the people running it should be made to understand that it is unacceptable to grit-blast right under people’s noses in Dock Number Two, or to run heavy machinery in the middle of the night.

Both of which are everyday life at the shipyard. There is no need for a Mepa investigation that lasts 1,000 years or for journalists to parrot that annoying and apologetic ‘allegedly’. The evidence weighs millions of tonnes and sounds like the banshee mating season.

Not that Palumbo would agree. I got homicidal last Friday when a man from the company (a certain Josef Calleja – the general manager, I think) told TVAM that he had ‘evidence’ of a hidden plot to harm and sabotage the shipyard’s operations, and that the complaints were all part of this plot.

Even when one makes allowances for the materials of his trade, that’s astonishingly brazen. It’s also a slap in the faces of all those who have to put up with the clangs and fumes of heavy industry right on their doorstep.

Since the TVAM hosts didn’t bother, I challenge Calleja to show us his ‘evidence’, and to explain exactly how and by whom the residents of Cospicua were roped into this grand conspiracy. I’ve a feeling I’d be unwise to hold my breath, except for the fact that I live in Cospicua and that Palumbo may be grit-blasting away, allegedly as always, even as I write.

mafalzon@hotmail.com