A love letter to an old Abu Dhabi neighbourhood on the eve of moving off-island

The National

2 days ago

Theorists have it that about 15 years represents a generational arc, at least in the modern conventions of people-focused labels for defining cycles, like Gen X or Gen Z. I've thought a lot about that timespan recently, having marked a generational block of time living in the same Abu Dhabi neighbourhood and street, beginning in 2009. By another measure, that accumulation of years is almost a lifetime in a city where development is often rapid.
The Mushrif neighbourhood I've called home for that period will be known to some as the churches area. If you trace the area's location on the map, it is bordered by Karamah and Airport Road on the wide multi-lane roads that run up the island and by Shakhbout bin Sultan Street and Mohammed bin Khalifa Street on the horizontal roads. This is the neighbourhood that Pope Francis drove to in a Kia Soul for a private mass at St Joseph's Cathedral in 2019, part of an impressive compound of multi-faith co-existence.
By dint of timing, I am also preparing to move out of the neighbourhood because two of the traditional triangulation points of family life – work and school – are either no longer nearby or needed. Work decamped many kilometres up the road some time ago, while the last bell of the final school year rang last month for our younger son. A mix of emotions hang in the air, punctuated by the question of what might that time spent in a single area reveal about the city's story?
This column was meant to be a love letter to the neighbourhood as I prepare to lock the doors of our fifth home in the street for the final time, but as a much quoted passage from Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres reminds us, 'love is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident'. What is left over in my case is almost inevitably a patchwork of admiration, loyalty and sentimentality.
I will miss the guys at our baqala who I talk cricket with and the laundry next door where I am considered mildly eccentric
The five homes in one small street tell part of the story itself, although three of those dwellings were packed into our first four years in Abu Dhabi as a family and the last two account for the past 12 years. The rental market was hot to the point of being burns-inducing when we arrived, but prices fell and we moved into bigger spaces with lower rents as the years went by. The lesson seemed to be that all markets steady themselves if you are prepared to show the requisite patience.
The street's name has changed three times over the period and the numbering system for the villas and apartments is on its second reprise. In the pre-street name and map apps era, the vernacular language of direction-giving involved a form of landmark naming that only stopped when both parties landed on descriptors they knew. Those habits have proved hard to shift. My family roll their eyes when I get into a taxi and reel off a laundry list of waypoints for navigational purposes.
More than a decade ago, I fretted that change might overwhelm the neighbourhood. At the back end of 2012, the so-called car souq was cleared out of the block. Initially, the neighbourhood felt stripped of its livelihood as well as the sometimes-remarkable inventory of second-hand cars.
The baqala licensing system was introduced at the same time, requiring small grocery shops to modernise. Some stores closed but others prospered and many other former workspaces of car dealers were reimagined as affordable restaurants. The crowning glory of that movement has been the Michelin-guide listing of one of the Airport Road restaurants, proving that imposed change can often produce something wonderful. History also unequivocally confirms I was wrong to worry.
Similarly, the old Children and Ladies Park was refurbished to become the beautifully landscaped Umm Al Emarat park and the green lungs of the neighbourhood nearly a decade ago. The tree-tagging project, a programme overseen by Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, arrived earlier this year with the addition of QR-code enabled tags to mature trees, thereby securing the leafy descriptor of the neighbourhood's streets for generations to come.
There have been unanticipated changes as well. The neighbourhood started the era with three long-established schools and ended with the same number, but the plot where Choueifat used to stand is now an empty lot and the other two education stalwarts of the area, the British School Al Khubairat and St Joseph's have been supplemented by the newer Liwa International School. Choueifat is now off-island. Two of the larger coffee shops and restaurants that used to do a healthy trade in serving school parents at that end of the block have recently closed, suggesting, perhaps, that every action has a reaction.
Of course, people matter as much as physical places. I will remember the intense sadness that enveloped the street when the elder of a nearby family died in a summer long past. I miss neighbours who left years ago and those who we will soon leave behind. I will miss the guys at our baqala who I talk cricket with and the laundry next door where I am considered mildly eccentric. My guilty conscience hasn't yet let me tell these shopkeepers that I will soon slip the bonds of all these years.
If there is a through line, it is that cities, like people, are mutable. They change in unexpected ways, so we shouldn't be too fixated by what might happen because you never know what will. And, perhaps, that you only know an era has ended when it appears in your rear-view mirror.