Tower Road, in Sliema could rightly be considered as emblematic of Malta’s microhistory. It borrowed its name from one of the Wignacourt coastal watchtowers when Sliema was exclusively rural and virtually uninhabited.

Then British servicemen and settlers took a shine to that area and started building round the coastline. As always happened, if the colonisers did it, hordes of the colonised slobbered to ape them.

Tower Road in the 1920s or earlier.

A postcard of Tower Road, used in 1925.

That accounts for the interminable rows of neat British-style bay-windowed bungalows that characterised the first incarnation of Tower Road. And that went hand in hand with the demographics: generally middle class, approximately English speaking, happy with snobbery and colonialism. Subtle class distinctions plagued even pre-war days – the real Brits would only settle for the ‘sunny side’ of Tower Road. The rest, the natives could fight over.

Casa Said, formerly an Art Nouveau landmark on Tower Road.

With independence in 1964, everything in the street changed. New money started asserting itself, the bay windows disappeared, the new gospel preached: higher and higher and the demographics became ever more assorted. In-your-face democracy put outdated gentility to shame. The new seal of fulfilment: the penthouse in Tower Road.

Pre-war Tower Road, corner with High Street. Photo: Alfred Vella Gera

With all its undoubted quaintness and charm, early Strada Torre hardly captivated everyone. Leading and prolific Malta camera artists like Horatio Agius, the Watsons, Geo Fürst, Walter Kümmerly and Tony Armstrong Jones published not one single image of the road in its romantic heyday. They must have dismissed it as dismally unphotogenic.

A 1930s photo of an Art Nouveau block, today used by Lombard Bank.

And, in truth, it proved particu­larly stingy with landmarks throughout its length – only the watchtower of the knights, the Art Nouveau Casa Said, the Meadowbank Hotel – and that almost exhausts its notable exceptions. No one ever thought of erecting a theatre or single place of worship, architecturally dignified or otherwise.

The Meadowbank Art Nouveau block on Tower Road. Photo: Alfred Vella Gera

Panoramic view of Tower Road, 1930s. Photo: Alfred Vella Gera

All images from the author’s collections.

An early post-war aerial view of Tower Road.