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.

The Coastline Salina Hotel, opened in 1970, restructured later.

The Tower Palace Hotel in Tower Road, Sliema, inaugurated in 1968, now demolished.

Ta’ Monita Holiday Complex in Marsascala, completed in 1968, partly demolished.

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’.

The Hyperion Hotel in Buġibba, St Paul’s Bay, completed in 1966 and later pulled down.

The Marina San George Complex, built in 1980, now demolished.

The Cavalieri Hotel in St Julian’s, opened in 1968, now demolished.

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.

The Festival Holiday Complex next to the Red Tower, Mellieħa, opened in 1980, now destroyed.

The Le Roy Hotel in Sliema, built in 1968, later incorporated in the Plevna Hotel.

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?

The Ramla Bay Hotel in Marfa, inaugurated in 1964, and later demolished.

The Dolmen Hotel in Buġibba, opened in 1966, extensively rebuilt

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.