Richard England revolutionised the aesthetics of hotel building. His creativity marks the frontier between two eras: pre-England and post-England.
This flourishing of genius coincided with the tourist boom that followed Independence, when entrepreneurs from the hospitality industry first seem to have warmed up to the rewards of great functional design, rather than to the lures of pokey soullessness and penny-pinching.
Sadly, of that surfeit of inspired invention, absolutely nothing remains. One after the other, England’s 11 masterpieces have all, to the very last one, been demolished or defiled beyond recognition.
It is bizarre to have to pigeonhole as gloomy nostalgia what was erected during our own lifetime, rather than as splendid living record. But, face it, that is the accepted homemade concept of ‘progress’.
This flourishing of genius coincided with the tourist boom that followed Independence
Architecture ought to be the most eternal of the arts – bricks and mortar far more durable than painting or sculpture. Shamefully, rapacity has succeeded in turning architecture into the most ephemeral.
England leaves his fingerprints everywhere his creations touch. You will never guess who designed any other hotel in Malta but you have to be aesthetically comatose not to identify what England breathed life into.
He married inextricably a ballast of vernacular to the purities of primordial shapes – almost neolithic visions projected to a future. What does it say of those who, systematically, destroyed them all, to the very last one?
I have deliberately chosen to illustrate this feature through images almost exclusively drawn from promotion postcards issued by the hotels just after their inauguration. My selection includes many of the leading publishers: the Cathedral Library, Alfred Galea Zammit, the ABC Library, Sinet Malta, Printex, Perfecta. Thank them all for contributing to keeping alive a memorial to the wounded mastermind that is Richard England.