Times building to make way for 50 apartments

The austere Strickland House on St Paul’s Street in Valletta, which hosted the Times of Malta for four decades, will become a luxury apartment complex.

The project by Hili Twenty Two Ltd, which acquired the building from the Allied Group, will develop 50 apartments on eight floors, two of which will be receded. The project includes five basement garage levels and a cafeteria, and promises to be the first major residential development in Valletta in a long time.

Unlike the present building’s rows of rectangular windows, the façade proposed by architect Martin Xuereb is characterised by a mixture of closed and open balconies with wrought iron railings.

The new building will see the number of floors increase from five to eight, with the actual height increasing by less than five metres.

Allied Newspapers moved its printing press out of the building to its new premises in Mriehel in 2011, with the Times of Malta newsroom and administrative staff vacating the Valletta building in the summer of 2017.

Strickland House was the largest, privately-owned building for sale in Valletta when the Hili Twenty Two acquired it, with its unique location right next to Auberge de Castille, in close proximity to the parliament building as well as the city’s commercial and cultural hubs.

The building measures approximately 6,800sq.m.

Although Strickland House has stood on this site for the past 90 years, the existing structure was only built after 1979 when Labour Party thugs set the building on fire. Labour Party supporters who attended a mass rally in Valletta went on a rampage by first burning down Strickland House, while employees were still inside, and then ransacking Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami’s family home in Birkirkara. That fateful day – 15 October, 1979 – became known as Black Monday.

The only remnant of that fateful Monday at Strickland House was a blackened wall on the topmost floor of the building that was retained behind a Perspex sheet and a small plaque recording the date.

READ MORE: Allied Newspapers to sell iconic Strickland House in Valletta