Sliema Point Battery

Where it sits. Sliema Point Battery stands directly on Tower Road, the three-kilometre seafront promenade along the open, northeastern edge of the Sliema peninsula — the neck of land that separates Marsamxett Harbour from St Julian's Bay. Everyone in Malta calls it Il-Fortizza, the fortress, and the name has stuck so thoroughly that the official one is rarely used. It is impossible to miss: a squat, honey-coloured mass of turrets and crenellations sitting where the promenade meets the rocks, about 200 metres along the shore from Saint Julian's Tower, the 1658 De Redin watchtower that gave Tower Road its name.

Why the British built it. The battery was a direct product of Colonel William Jervois's report of 1866, a memorandum on the improvements the defences of Malta and Gibraltar needed given the arrival of iron-plated warships and powerful rifled guns. The old smooth-bore batteries around the harbours could no longer keep armoured ships at a distance, and a programme of replacement followed. Construction at Sliema Point began in 1872 and finished in 1876 at a total cost of £12,000. The position was chosen because it covers the open approach to the harbour mouth from the northeast, the sector that Fort Tigné and Fort St Elmo could not reach.

A fort dressed as a castle. What makes the building unusual is its architecture. Rather than the stripped, low-profile engineering of the period — the approach taken at Fort Tigné a kilometre away, or at Cambridge Battery a little further along — the British gave Sliema Point Battery a full Gothic Revival treatment: corner turrets, a machicolated parapet, arrow-slit motifs and an elaborate main gate. The reason was frankly aesthetic. Sliema was in the middle of turning itself into a Victorian seaside resort, its promenade lined with villas and boarding houses, and a picturesque mock-medieval castle was a far more acceptable neighbour than a bare earth-and-concrete gun position. It is a rare instance of coastal artillery designed with an eye on property values.

What it carried. Behind the castellated frontage the battery was a serious work. It mounted two 10-inch and two 11-inch rifled muzzle-loading guns, weapons in the same generation as those at Fort Pembroke up the coast, sited to engage warships standing off the shore. Those guns were removed in 1905, by which time breech-loading ordnance elsewhere had rendered them obsolete, and a searchlight tower was raised on part of the structure. In its second career the battery worked as a defence electric light position, illuminating vessels approaching the Grand Harbour area at night for the guns that could still reach them — an unglamorous but essential role that it held into the twentieth century.

Swimmers and water polo. From about 1912 the Sliema Aquatic Sports Club began gathering at the rocks beside the battery, and a water polo pitch was eventually built in the sea alongside it. It is still there and still in use, which gives the site an oddity worth pausing over: a Victorian gun battery with a competitive water polo tank in its shadow, and, on summer evenings, the sound of a match carrying up over a nineteenth-century parapet. Malta takes the sport seriously, and the club is one of the older ones on the island.

What you actually see today. The battery now trades as a bar and restaurant, Il-Fortizza, which came under new management in 2009 and which occupies the interior and the terraces. That means the building is easy to enter and to look at from the inside, although the fittings are those of a restaurant rather than a museum. The exterior is the main event: seen from the promenade the turrets read as pure Victorian theatre, and seen from the rocks below, with the water polo enclosure in the foreground and the open sea behind, the composition is one of the most photographed on the Sliema front. A short walk in either direction takes in Saint Julian's Tower and its 1715 battery, now also a restaurant, and the rock-cut bathing pools and ladders that serve as Sliema's beaches.

Getting there and timing. Tower Road is served by buses running between Sliema and St Julian's, and the battery is a twenty-minute walk from the Sliema ferry landing or ten minutes from Balluta Bay. The seaward façade faces northeast, so the stonework is lit in the early morning and falls into shadow by mid-afternoon; sunset here happens behind the town. Winter storms drive spray clean over the parapet and across the road, which is worth watching from a distance and unpleasant to be caught in. The promenade outside is level and paved; the interior involves steps.