“Like preserving the cover of a book, but not its contents.” This is what Peter Serracino Inglott thinks of façadism – in this case of the proposal to gut the interiors and keep the façades of a number of buildings in Strait Street.

There are plenty of reasons why I couldn’t agree more. This space has many a time bashed the odd ‘conservation’ strategy of keeping façades and destroying interiors.

It may be worth revisiting the point by talking about the cover, the contents, and the relation between them in the Maltese context.

On the face of it (there we go) façades and interiors seem to be worlds apart and kept separate by that great divide between public and private. I suppose one reason why heritage legislation tends to favour façades over interiors is that the former, by virtue of being in the public view, are also open to (visual) appropriation by the public.

As such they lend themselves to notions of collective ownership, and therefore of the state. They may connect with the state by other means – for example, if they carry features (say, old stone balconies in Gozo) that figure within a portfolio of national heritage.

There is in this sense something liminal about façades. They are private inasmuch as they are private property, but not unproblematically so. People seem to sense this tension when they complain that ‘mill-bieb ’il ġewwa biss tiegħek’ (only what’s behind the front door is yours).

The public face of façades means they may also serve as a theatre of political activity and ideas. Recent Maltese history serves up at least two textbook cases. The first is that of the party każini (clubs) façades, which until the 1990s or so were among the prime sites of partisan practice.

Because many każini façades enjoy the visual prominence of main roads and village squares, a lot used to go to make them look the part.

I remember people talking about the decorations or party slogans draped over some każin façade. I seem to recall that the Floriana clubs were particularly inventive.

Which in turn attracted another type of partisan enterprise, namely that of undoing (defacing) façades. The joke was that some façades existed for the sole purpose of being periodically defaced and destroyed.

The ritual cycle of slogan, counter-slogan, and destruction was part of our political liturgy. It went horribly wrong at least once, in Gudja in 1986.

The 1980s bring me to the second example. At the time, government was in the habit of giving away plots of land for free or about so. The idea apparently was to encourage people to become home owners, and ‘estates’ of terraced houses mushroomed all over the island.

This is usually vaunted as an example of supreme socialist benevolence. But the truth is Margaret Thatcher was doing much the same in Britain by selling off council housing to tenants at discount prices. Truth also is that Thatcher was not terribly socialist.

Nothing expresses the political schizophrenia of our housing estates like their façades. Family crests cast long shadows over the gypsum lions and railings that stand guard over the personalised ‘plots’, and house numbers are jettisoned for names.

Plots to the people for free on the one hand, heraldry and fortified property on the other… funny old world.

That said, there is something fishy about the idea that book contents and cover exist on different planets.

Façades carry an implication of deceit. They seem to speak of the impossibility of finding the mind’s construction in the face, of a detachment from the interior. I’m not sure that’s correct.

Façades, for example, tell us stories about interiors and their inhabitants. They may, and in Malta very often do, speak of their religious loyalties and devotions.

‘Edelweiss’ tells of the couple’s honeymoon or musical tastes. ‘Id-Dwejra’ reminds us of the emotions that are invested in homes (the diminutive is also used as a form of endearment) while rusticated stone apes authenticity.

Façades may also represent to the world the divisions of labour of the interior. For example, there are usually two aspects to the state of the art. The first concerns the stone- and paint-work and type of apertures and is typically the male domain.

Women, however, keep the various embellishments of the façade clean. They also dress windows, those showcases of domestic governance.

Whatever the case, the one thing façades in Malta seldom are, is boring. Even if we leave aside the solemn faces of stately buildings, there is tremendous pleasure to be had in walking an average street in any old patch of housing, new or ancient. That’s because façade and interior are connected.

It’s also not necessarily the case that ‘mill-bieb ’il ġewwa biss tiegħek. In some parts of Malta interiors tend to spill over into what we would otherwise take to be ‘public’ space, and vice-versa.

The best examples of this are to be found in village alleys and some of the narrower streets of the harbour towns.

The point is that the conceptual separation between exterior and interior (which, as in the case of Strait Street, can be physically consequential) rests on something of a myth. That being the total opposition between private and public, probably one of the main founding myths of the West especially.

It seems to me that the best way to overcome façadism is to think of the contents and cover as very much linked.

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