Malta Maritime Museum

Where it sits. The Malta Maritime Museum occupies the long, pale building that dominates Birgu's waterfront on Dockyard Creek, immediately behind the yacht marina and a few minutes' walk from the ferry landing. Its clock tower is the landmark you steer for when arriving from Valletta by boat. The site itself is significant: this stretch of quay was the Order of St John's galley arsenal, where the fleet was hauled out, repaired and stored, so shipbuilding and ship-keeping have gone on here more or less continuously since the sixteenth century.

The building. What stands today is a Royal Naval Bakery of the 1840s, put up when the British realised that supplying bread and ship's biscuit to the whole Mediterranean Fleet from small dispersed ovens was inefficient. The design is attributed to William Scamp, an Admiralty architect who worked on several of the more accomplished British buildings in Malta. It is a serious industrial building dressed in restrained classical clothes: a long façade with rhythmic arched openings, a central pediment and clock, thick walls to hold heat, and internal spaces sized for steam-driven mixing and rows of ovens capable of turning out tens of thousands of rations a day. Understanding it as a factory rather than a palace makes the interior make sense.

What is inside. The collection runs to more than twenty thousand objects and is the largest held by any museum on the islands. Its spine is chronological, from prehistory to the present, and its strength is that Malta's maritime history is unusually complete: Phoenician and Roman trade, the galley fleets of the Order, the corsairing economy of the seventeenth century, the Royal Navy's long occupation, the merchant marine and the modern dockyard. Among the standouts are Roman anchors recovered from Maltese waters, including lead anchor stocks of exceptional size; a collection of traditional Maltese small craft — the dgħajsa tal-pass that ferried people across the creeks, the luzzu with its painted eye, the kajjik — which are increasingly rare afloat; ships' models by the hundred; navigational instruments; and heavy marine engines and workshop machinery from the dockyard era.

Why the small boats matter most. Visitors usually arrive expecting galleys and battleships and leave talking about the harbour boats. For four centuries the creeks functioned as streets, and the dgħajsa was the taxi: a double-ended, high-stemmed rowing boat, brightly painted, worked standing up with crossed oars. Thousands operated in the Grand Harbour when the fleet was in. Almost all are gone, replaced by roads and bridges and outboard launches, and the museum holds one of the few substantial collections of the real thing. The painted decoration, the eye on the bow inherited from Phoenician practice, and the sheer economy of the hull form repay a slow look.

A museum in transition. The building has been the subject of a large, long-running restoration and redisplay project, intended to open up spaces that were closed for decades and to rebuild the permanent galleries around the whole structure rather than a fraction of it. The work has been carried out in phases, which means that at any given moment some parts of the museum may be open while others are behind hoardings, and the display you see may differ from published guides. Anyone making a special journey should check the current position with Heritage Malta before travelling. The upside is that the restored spaces are genuinely impressive, since the original interiors are among the finest industrial architecture in the country.

Getting there and timing. The passenger ferry from Lascaris Wharf under Valletta lands two minutes' walk away, which is by far the best approach: the building is designed to be seen from the water. Buses stop at the Birgu land front, about eight minutes on foot. There is paid parking near the waterfront that fills up in the evenings. Access from the quay is reasonably level compared with the rest of Birgu, though there are steps and changes of level inside. Allow an hour and a half for a full circuit, more if you are the kind of person who reads every model's caption. Afterwards, the marina's restaurants are immediately outside the door, and the Inquisitor's Palace, St Lawrence's church and Fort St Angelo are all within ten minutes on foot, which makes this the natural first stop of a Birgu day rather than the last.