This month’s additions to the Abu Dhabi modern heritage register are a treat, adding a collection of familiar landmarks - such as the majestic mosaic-tiled rotunda of the former Terminal 1 building at Abu Dhabi International Airport - as well as a few sites that are, perhaps, less widely known, but equally worthy to the list.
It is often those less familiar names on this register and similar projects such as the Urban Treasures, which recognises the cultural significance of long-standing shops and restaurants, that offer the most reward to the observer, as they provide reference points for further exploration and inquiry.
The inclusion of the campus buildings for the International School of Choueifat in Al Ain, for instance, might provoke inquisitive looks from some, but this is a clear recognition of the long-standing place the buildings and the institution have within the community. The Al Ain campus was opened in 1980, two years after the Abu Dhabi site, which was sadly demolished in 2023. The architecture and design language of the school’s newer Khalifa City campus in Abu Dhabi, which is too young to be listed, appears to reference the old Mushrif site.
The inclusion of other landmarks such as the Cedar Fountain and the Geneva Flower Clock, both in Al Zahiyah, formerly known as the Tourist Club area, nod to a time when the city was racing towards its future and a period when they were both more significant landmarks than they are today, such is the sheer range of museums and attractions that greet the visitor or city dweller now. The tide of memories that the long-gone but much-loved Volcano Fountain always provokes, illustrates the importance of preserving the older parts of the city where possible as well as the loss people feel if they are removed.
All told, Abu Dhabi has made excellent strides to protect its past via the modern heritage register, urban treasures list and other similar endeavours, but it may also pay dividends to preserve the prosaic as well as the mosaic.
I wrote in these pages a few months ago about leaving the Abu Dhabi neighbourhood in Mushrif I’d called home for 16 years and relocating to another part of the city.
Last week, I took an impromptu drive down our former street, which was part of one of the older suburbs of the city. This was not a full-blown nostalgia tour - we only left the area six months ago - but more like a quick trip down memory lane to see what, if anything, had changed.
It had. Apart from mature trees being managed and road markings being renewed, there was a distinct absence in one part of the street, with an older house being demolished under municipality-authorised works. Its foundations are now being dug out and the site tidied up. The residential building in question was more than 40 years old, and one which I lived next door to for more than half a decade and alongside it for much longer than that.
A picture of the street from the early 1980s, taken in all probability after the great storm of 1983, shows the building standing as a relatively new arrival in a developing neighbourhood, when the street itself was unpaved and pools of water formed in the natural potholes that occurred after the downpour. I have my own images from the early 2010s, by which time the street had been paved for many years and I know that the building was tenanted for most of its decades-long life. Now it is gone.
It was a genuine surprise to find a hole in what some might call the prosaic landscape of low-rise suburbia, although you could also describe it as the quiet beauty of the city’s older neighbourhoods. There was nothing especially exceptional about the building, but its removal and absence provided a personal jolt.
What lessons are to be learnt? Well, the first is to say that opinion writers should avoid returning to past subjects because they will expose their own hypocrisy and contradictions.
When I left the old neighbourhood six months ago, my main takeaways were that cities are mutable and that we shouldn’t fret too much when they do change. And yet, here I am expressing some form of recoil at what I found on a brief return to the past. It also rarely pays to go back, because replaying the past often only serves to find fault with the present. Established neighbourhoods are just as likely to change as rapidly as anywhere else.
But there is also something to say about the removal of a small part of the fabric of older neighbourhoods. Many more buildings in the city are approaching a similar age and will pose the same questions about whether they continue to be used or are now fit to lose from the landscape. A good number of previously single-occupancy buildings have been converted to multiple occupancy dwellings, which could serve to extend their lives or, conversely, to shorten them.
What then is fair to remove and what should be earmarked for renovation? These are difficult decisions to make. Not everything is worth preserving, nor should it be, but every time an older building disappears, a piece of the past is taken away. That much is a certainty.
Mature trees have been tagged all over the city to protect their future. There may be a case for a similar project to determine the future of our often-humble suburban past.
