It has been for almost forty years a peculiar and affecting image in the Gibraltar mind: The Upper Town. I capitalise and title it as such because the mere mention of those three little words will cause a Pavlovian effect on persons over a certain age who have lived in or visited Gibraltar for any length of time. If a young composer was seeking inspiration for a Stabat Mater they need only come to Gibraltar and ask people what they thought about The Upper Town, pause, and then wait for the outpouring of mournful, lachrymose, regretful tones. “Why has it been left to rot?” “In every other European city I have visited, the upper town is the jewel in the crown!” “I remember the patio culture.” “Nobody locked their doors in those days.” “The greedy landlords are to blame!” “The Government is to blame!” Now imagine all those statements each being sung by a solo voice, preferably standing sorrowfully under a guttering streetlamp at the junction of Ansaldo’s Passage and Castle Street. The final crescendo from the choir would be a resounding: “The Government is to blame!” Because all governments are to blame for the state of Gibraltar’s The Upper Town.
Not many ancient quarters can be seen from a distance, they are usually dwarfed under the sprawling growth of new towns and the 20th Century love of the skyscraper. Gibraltar’s old town is visible and obvious, in an elevated position it stares right out from the face of the rock, the naked eye drawn to the Moorish Castle’s Tower of Homage, that stalwart image pre-dating the British. There are innumerable depictions of these higgledy-piggledy rooftops, chimneys and coloured facades that cling to the limestone and themselves, either shimmering under the sun or floating fantastically amidst levanter cloud. Gustavo Bacarisas’s View of Gibraltar from The Cecil Hotel is a particular favourite of mine. Its impressionistic style and the daubing of subtle, pastel colour swimming in warm golden light under a blue sky could have been painted last week and not in 1946. Most elements of The Upper Town remain unchanged. Is that what makes it such a tragic reminder of wanton neglect? If it had been bulldozed completely or was littered with modern towers it would have evolved in the collective memory as something else. But The Upper Town is preserved in aspic, not in the correct manner by an able chef, this immovable feast is like out-of-date prawns plonked into gelatine just a tad too late. You can smell them as soon as the fridge door swings open, you can see the tinges of green fur.
Many a Gibraltar Chief Minister has been heard crowing about how wealthy the place is by quoting GDPs and nebulous statistics; while a short walk from Government HQ and up Hospital Ramp will lead to a veritable, noxious slum where many a politician boasts about being brought up but would not entertain living today. Not even on the palatable outskirts. The Upper Town, as its name suggests, is elevated above the main shopping thoroughfares and arduous hills and steps are unavoidable. You’d think that town planners and civil engineers (and, yes, Governments) would have incorporated urban lifts and funiculars as seen in Lisbon, Santander and myriad other steep-streeted towns. It’s 2024 and there’s one small escalator that just leads to more steps and is forever broken, or a single bus that runs every half hour and stops at 9pm. The route is so elongated and circuitous leaving a Hobson’s Choice between sitting on it and getting motion sickness or simply trudging up the narrow lanes and seeking out a decent watering hole. Now there’s the rub, there are none. Gone are the days when nestled somewhere between a butcher’s and Johnny Balloons, a door on the street would reveal a public house. Nowadays the weary explorer has nowhere to sup and nowhere to pee either. Why are there no bars and restaurants in The Upper Town? Because nobody can get up there! It’s one of those frustrating circular arguments, like the reason the Government say they don’t have buses running anywhere on the Rock after 9pm. Their excuse is that there’s not enough passengers at night. How do they know when there has never been a bus service at night and they have never bothered to trial one?
I can hear the chorus on Road to the Lines, they are looking over the wall into the jungle and shaking their heads. A bass laments, “They don’t care, they never did. They don’t care, they never did!”
I bought my first property at the age of 25 and it was a 2-bed, 1st floor flat at the top of Prince Edward’s Road near the junction of Flat Bastion Road. I had a newborn baby and a toddler and people warned us against it. They said there would be nowhere to park a car, it was filthy, the neighbours would be low-class; smugglers; or, they said in a racist tone, Moroccans, and our children would be forced to go to Sacred Heart School. Oh, the horror! I loved my new home. It was central so I did not need to drive and the view from my kitchen was of a glorious large tree and a spooky old Masonic Institute with hidden stained-glass windows. Up until then I was unaware of Masons being in Gibraltar (probably hiding from Franco). To me the whole area was redolent of Italy; painted shutters, washing dangling from internal courtyards, and the fish man who would blow a whistle and sell his wares from the back of a small van. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to me it was dripping in beauty. Yes, the pavements were sometimes so narrow that a pram’s wheels would drop off the edge but you learnt to walk on the road and hold up the traffic, it was one’s right as a resident of The Upper Town; soon I strutted the streets with bravado. The small shops had their owns rules with opening hours, things for sale, and what order they would serve people depending on their racial bias. The Indian man on the corner of Governor’s Street was know as Pepe, the girls from Carter’s threw icy looks at a woman who’d relentlessly pump coins into the poker machine while chain smoking, and what of the "dreaded" Moroccans? Their bunches of mint and coriander hanging from door frames would perfume the unwashed streets.
Tear out your hair in grief and belt out a Requiem for The Upper Town it is dead and the coroner is asking why. The cause of death is something quite simple, a lack of imagination. A cursory glance at those in power over the last forty years will reveal many men with bad taste. The sort who wouldn’t know a sash window from a sliding aluminium, who change their cars regularly and generally think old equates to bad and should be disposed of and replaced with new. For years all the social cases would be shoved up into the areas no respectable person would want to walk through let alone live in creating a sprawling ghetto. Obviously, that didn’t end well and policy changed (a bit). Governments cannot ignore living people and their problems and neither can they ignore The Upper Town, that looming Behemoth whose bones are tubes of bronze, and limbs are bars of iron. How ignorant and short sighted the politicians have been. These streets are not going away, in fact people are choosing to live on them and tourists want to meander around them and spend their money in shops, bars and hotels. Money! That thing that all governments love and many have no idea how to handle. The Upper Town is the diamond in the rough, it’s not a mirage in theatrical mist, it was there all along and could have been a source of great wealth and merriment. Can it be resurrected?
Excellent, sad, article.
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