Page 218 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

198 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

lamented the bad publicity which Manama received in the British press
following complaints by air passengers in transit. 11 While the network of
motor roads which connected Manama to the rest of the islands was
established at the beginning of the 1930s and was heavily subsidised by
the oil company, the road system in the inner city improved steadily after
the establishment of the municipality. 12 During a brief visit in 1923, the
British political resident noted that car circulation had improved dra-
matically and that the new network of motor roads joined the agency
and the Customs House and connected Manama to Shaykh Hamad’s
residence in al-Sakhir. Before the completion of his palace in the new
district of al-Qudaybiyyah in 1927, the roads of the inner city were used
to stage official parades, and allowed the police to patrol markets and
neighbourhoods more efficiently. 13
In other important respects the control of roads was central to the new
engineering of urban space on the part of the government. As roads
became the modern services and facilities par excellence, they became
antithetical to the unruly layout and messy appearance of barasti com-
pounds. The resilience of the barastis in the inner city symbolised the
growing political threat posed by Bahrain’s lumpenproletariat which was
developing around the oil industry. The first official ban on the construc-
tion of huts was enforced in 1937 along the main arteries which embraced
and intersected the quarters of the old town. Ten years later the area
affected was extended to the modern residential area of al-Qudaybiyyah
but excluded the popular quarters of northeastern Manama where many
informal communities still lived. 14 While modern thoroughfares fixed the
geographical boundaries of the old neighbourhoods, they became the
showcase of the state administration as they were named after Belgrave,
political agents who had served in the 1920s and early 1930s and members
of the ruling family.
Bahrain’s embryonic bureaucracy also started to categorise the inner
city in an orderly and systematic fashion. Since 1939, the publication of
Jaridah al-Bahrayn (The Bahrain Gazette) contributed to the standard-
isation of the names of localities as it included the announcement of the
sale and purchase of properties issued by the Department of Land
Registration. The official nomenclature of roads, neighbourhoods and

11
MMBM, 4 Dhu al-Hijjah 1367/7 October 1948, R/15/2/1932 IOR; ‘Annual Report for
the Year 1368’ in The Bahrain Government Annual Reports, 1924–1970, vol. IV, p. 34.
12
Maps, ‘Bahrain Islands’, 1938 (BR 477) and 1944 (BH 477), BA.
13
Political Resident Bushehr to Government of India, 10 November 1923, n. 626-S, R/15/
2/127 IOR.
14
MMBM, 21 Jumada al-Ula 1356/30 July 1937, R/15/2/1924 IOR; I‘lan Baladiyyah al-
Manamah, 6 Dhu al-Hijjah 1367/9 October 1948, n. 6, R/15/2/1932 IOR.