Reading the news has become more and more depressing; every day there are more instances of lousy planning and permissions being given for horrendous development despite public objections. There can now be no doubt that the developers, not the government, run the island.
A lot of fuss has been made about trees which are not ‘indigenous’. To me and, I believe, for most people, trees are things of great beauty, whatever their variety. The thing that mystifies me is why does no one mourn the passing of Malta’s ‘indigenous houses’. Hundreds of attractive houses have been lost to make way for plastered concrete blocks of faceless character.
Look, for instance, at the main road leading into Żebbuġ; lots of lovely Maltese stone houses have been demolished and replaced by soulless blocks of flats.
I cannot imagine what the reaction would be in, say, Bath or Windsor if someone were to pull down a terraced house to replace with a modern building. People are proud of their architectural heritage and fight to keep it. Yet, it appears that Malta does not care, provided there is money to be made.
We already lost the main access road into Valletta, which went across the old City Gate, and gained instead what looks like a poor man’s stage set for Aida, plus an outdoor theatre that has all the attractiveness of a drydock.
Being a ‘foreigner’, I expect I will be told to go back where I came from (which was Ireland, not England) but I will not. I chose to live here because I love it, sometimes, perhaps more than some of the Maltese themselves do. I will be pleased and proud to hold a Maltese passport and become a citizen, especially to live in Gudja, though even here the bulldozers are making headway and several lovely stone houses have disappeared.
We need a new planning strategy with people who really care about their heritage before the whole island vanishes under a sea of cement.
As for the misguided person who this newspaper reported saying the new development at Pembroke would make Malta the “envy of the whole world”, he obviously has not travelled.