On 10 November 1942, Air Vice Marshall Sir Keith Park, one of the heroes of the Battle of Britain, landed on the Qrendi airfield in his personal hurricane OK2 to inspect a guard of honour.
The airfield, used as a WWII decoy to lure German bombers away from Luqa, played an important part in British plans to liberate Sicily. Spitfires at Qrendi would escort bombers and transport aircraft to support Allied troops in Sicily, and used in bombing sorties.
But 65 years on, the airfield and its surviving hangars are being considered to house a mega-cow farm and a manure plant – a rather unfitting end to its glorious past.
In the 1970s, with the departure of the British forces, the airfield’s control room and hangars were leased to a private poultry producer. And now the government wants to terminate the lease, to relocate 17 cow farms, many of which are ironically situated in historical forts around the area.
The Superintendence for Cultural Heritage has sounded the alarm and written to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority asking for the protection of the historical site.
“This is one of the few intact Second World War airfields in the Mediterranean,” superintendent Tony Pace told MaltaToday of the airfield, which was a strategic link in plans to invade and liberate Sicily from fascism.
“These airfields were built with great sacrifice by the Maltese under heavy bombardment and were designed by British officers who fought the battle of Britain.”
Pace described the decision taken in the 1970s to allocate this piece of history to chicken breeders as “an insult to this historical memory”, saying the same mistake should not be made again by allowing the development of a cow farm and a manure treatment plant.
In his letter to MEPA, Pace proposed that the historic airfield should be handed over to the Aviation Museum.
The museum’s director Ray Polidano told MaltaToday the site could be ideal for microlight planes and that it could hold untapped potential for tourism. “In the same way that Malta is being promoted as a location to berth yachts, it can attract owners of WWII plans to park their spitfires on in the Qrendi airstrip. Surely this will be a much better use of a historical place than giving it away to the cows,” Polidano said.
Contacted by MaltaToday, a MEPA spokesperson acknowledged that the government is aware of the site’s historical value and that a decision will only be taken after an Environmental Impact Assessment. “This is very different from what previous governments did when they allowed various historical places to be used for farms without even conducting any study.”
But finding a suitable location for the new cow farm is proving elusive. The original site was abandoned after protests from the nearby Church home Dar il-Providenza and Church newspaper Il-Gens. Subsequently, the present leaseholder of the airfield Victor Borg railed against the proposal because he wants to develop the place as an agro-tourism centre equipped with facilities for horse racing.