Great news: Balzan has preserved every last crumb of its pasta factory, evenly, beneath 29 flats
The heritage watchdog asked for the early-20th-century factory to be preserved and integrated. It has been integrated, thoroughly, as hardcore under the new foundations.
For most of a century, Macaroni Premier did one honest thing: it made pasta. The factory went up on the Balzan corner between the wars, a confident slab of interwar industry, and fed the island its macaroni while the twentieth century happened around it.
It has now been preserved as completely as a building can be, which is to say flattened, and we could not be prouder of how quickly. When the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage asked, reasonably enough, for “any preservation and integration of this early 20th century structure into the proposed development, reflecting the architectural and contextual value of the building,” the answer arrived with remarkable punctuality: the factory came down, in full, roughly one week later. You ask for preservation; we deliver it by the tonne.
Integration, achieved
We want to be clear that the authority’s wish was honoured to the letter. It asked for the building to be integrated into the development, and it has been, thoroughly, as a fine and evenly distributed layer of hardcore beneath the new foundations. There is no more integrated a building than the one that has become the floor.
The permit that would not die
Best of all, none of this needed the new plans to be approved first. The demolition rode in on an older permit, first sought in 2008, refused in 2009, granted on reconsideration in 2011, then left unused until it lapsed, then renewed in 2018, then renewed again in 2023. The 2018 version clings to life thanks to the pandemic-era extensions that the government handed out to development permits like sweets. Like all the best horror villains, the permit simply would not stay dead. The factory proved less resilient: it stood for a century and lost to a piece of paper from 2008.
What rises in its place
Where the pasta once cooled, a five-storey block will stand: a showroom and a cafeteria at street level, 29 apartments above, two of them penthouses with their own swimming pools, and two basement levels holding thirty parking spaces. The penthouse pools come with what one resident billed as “a very nice view of the bkara bypass.” From flour to floor space in a single permit, and not a strand of macaroni wasted.
The Balzan council objected. So did Din l-Art Ħelwa, whose representative mourned the eradication of “a rare example of our architectural heritage.” Residents floated the usual joyless alternatives, a bookshop, a creative centre, even a bakery, as though a building this rare ought to be kept and, worse, used. We understand the sentiment, and gently point out that rarity is the very thing we have enhanced: there is now one fewer of these buildings, which makes each surviving one rarer still. You are welcome.
