More old photos

Here are more of the old photos I rediscovered recently.

These I took in the fish market and the fruit/vegetable market in Deira in 1980. 

Back in the day...

I've been through that forgotten bag of old Dubai photos I mentioned the other day and scanned some of them, so it's time to share them with you.

What's interesting is not so much the buildings themselves in these photos but what's around them. Or, compared with today, what's not around them.

My first apartment was in a brand new building and I was one of the first to move in.

It was in Deira just behind Al Ghurair City. Although back in 1977 when I moved in construction of Al Ghurair Centre, as it was originally called, hadn't been started.

Mine was the top floor apartment on the right of the building. From it, three or four years later, I had a good view of Al Ghurair Centre.

 You can see that it was still  far from the built-up area that it is today - in fact it was almost rural:

Over the other side of the Creek, behind the newly-opened Trade Centre was the Hilton hotel. This photo has a note on the back that it was taken in 1979.

The Hilton was demolished a few years ago but the Clock Tower is still very much in place, although not the prominent landmark that it was back then:

The Dubai Municipality building in Deira is still there, but the surrounds are very different now.

 This one was also taken in 1979, from Deira looking across the Creek to Bur Dubai:

 No concrete banks you'll notice, just the natural sand and plenty of dhows and fishing boats.

There were a lot of original buildings in Bur Dubai too, complete with original, working wind towers.

Treasure Chest

I've discovered a treasure chest. Or to be accurate, a treasure plastic bag.


Full of stuff I didn't know I had, it was hidden way back behind stacks of other stuff in the dark depths of a large cupboard.

A bag full of stuff from Dubai from 1977 up to about 1982.

I've been sorting through it and I've come up with a selection of photos and some other bits that I'll share with you over a few posts.

A real find was an old vinyl 45rpm record, one that we played at every gig we had with our mobile DuneBeat Disco.

The cover is the fabulous 'Life in the Emirates', but inside it the disc was 'Back in Dubai'...

But I did find a copy of 'Life in the Emirates', on an old cassette tape:

And there was another home-made tape, featuring 'Alex & The KayGee's, Live at the Cafe Royal, Dubai International Hotel'.


Dubai International was one of Dubai's earliest five-star hotels - it's still there opposite the airport but now changed to Le Meridien Dubai.

Back in the day it was the place to go. It had one of the city's first discos, Studio 7, and Cafe Royal, the fine dining restaurant. And it really was the best fine dining, with superb food and service and a big showband, which was Alex & The KayGees.

They started the evening with just the piano player, who was gradually joined by other musicians as the evening progressed. They ramped the sound up until eventually about fifteen musicians made up the big band, then the girl singers came on and finally Alex, the lead singer, with his big voice, big hair, big personality.

It was some show.

Here they are, with some of the Cafe Royal waiters. From memory, they were the first Filipinos to come to Dubai so they were real trail-blazers:

Cafe Royal was so popular that they couldn't fit in all the people who wanted to dine there, so on Thursdays they took the restaurant outdoors.

If you've been to the hotel you'll know it has nearly forty acres of landscaped gardens, and that's where they built a series of food stations, put down a dance floor and bandstand and had many more tables than they could have indoors.

Not a good photo but you'll get the idea. Dancers over on the top right, the bandstand just to the left of them:

Those were the days.

Dubai 1977

I've been fossicking around at the bottom of boxes and the back of drawers looking for more photos that I took in Dubai when I arrived the first time in 1977.

I found some 35mm slides, processed by a lab I'd completely forgotten about, United Colour Film Co of Ajman.

My first apartment was in a new building in Deira, just behind what is now Al Ghurair City (which hadn't been started when I moved here). There's a photo of it on an earlier 'old Dubai' post, here.

Anyway, in the heart of Deira I took this shot from my sixth-floor apartment:

Plenty of people still kept their livestock like this, a few hundred metres from the Inter.Continental hotel on the Creek.

Across in Bur Dubai, there wasn't a lot of development around Dubai Museum either:

 We had some interesting retail options in those days ( I love the brand name on the box by the way, click on the pic to enlarge it):

 And last but not least, my very favourite of all my old Dubai photographs:

Yes, it's the Imperil Restaurant.

Why, du? Why?

In my post of yesterday, which included some photographs I took in Dubai back in the early eighties, I finished with this:

(You'll find many more shots of Dubai back in the seventies and eighties if you hit my 'Old Dubai' label).

Then readers told me this:

Post a Comment On: Life in Dubai

Shalini said...

Great photos and so interesting to see the changes.
By the way, your "old Dubai" label comes up as a blocked page by Du.

March 22, 2011 6:16 PM


Dubai Photo Story said...

The old Dubai label is indeed blocked by du!!!!!

March 22, 2011 9:08 PM


They don't want you to see photos of Dubai in the old days? Why not?

Times they are a'changin'

Rostamani Tower, that's the one at the far left which I've arrowed, on Sheikh Zayed Road:

From my apartment at the back of the building I took this photograph:

Of course, that was back in 1981 when it was Abu Dhabi Road and it looked like this:

Photo: Torri Higgins

That's Rostamani Tower in the far top left, and that's how it was when I took the photo.

To get across the road to drive into Dubai we simply bumped across the sand between the two lanes and off we went. There were crashes of course but not like the ones we get now, by far the biggest problem then was speeding cars hitting wandering camels.

In the foreground is the Trade Centre, then Dubai's tallest building and I took a series of shots at a royal wedding celebrated in its shadow:

I found these photos when I was rummaging around in a cupboard back home in Oz last month. When I've posted old photos in the past they've been received well so I thought I'd share these with you too.

I came across some more of the Dubai Highland Games from the same early-eighties period too. Here's one of them, one of the several Arab Scottish Bagpipe Bands which performed at the Games.



The black & white photo by Torri Higgins I found on Len Chapman's wonderful website Dubai As It Used To Be.

(You'll find many more shots of Dubai back in the seventies and eighties if you hit my 'Old Dubai' label).

The opulence of Dubai

In Deira the other day I thought of the image Brand Dubai has generated overseas.

A picture's been drawn of luxury, opulence, wealth, the biggest, the tallest...

Walk through Deira though and you see the Dubai that isn't publicised overseas. From the stories I'd guess that most visiting journalists never see it and don't even know it exists.

We don't all drive around in luxurious cars or 4x4s...




It's not all, and only, huge marble-tiled shopping malls...



It isn't all high-end designer label boutiques...

We don't all live in super-luxury apartments or villas...

It's not all fancy jobs with huge expat salary packages, maids and gardeners...

It's a pity there's no balance in the stories.

Preserve, renovate, rebuild?

The other day I took the Metro into Bur Dubai and then had to go across into Deira, so naturally I walked down to the Creek and took the abra across.

The walk took me through Bastakiya, the original part of Dubai that's being 'preserved' by the Municipality.

I'd been in Old Town at Burj Dubai the day before and as I walked through Bastakiya I was comparing the two areas in my mind, and remembering what the old parts of town had been like when I was first here in 1977.

I always carry a little pocket digital camera with me, so I'd taken some photographs in Old Town and I took more in Bastakiya.

I've been rummaging through the few 'old Dubai' shots I have with me - the majority are in store back in Oz - and I'll start with a couple of those, taken in 1978.

Looking across from Deira, it used to be like this:



In both Bur Dubai and Deira there were still plenty of the old buildings, complete with their windtowers, barjeel in Arabic. They were a kind of air-conditioning system, long before electricity was available. They caught the breeze and directed it down into the house.



Narrow alleyways and sand rather than paved footpaths, easy to walk on though because it had been trodden down so hard over the years.



The buildings were basically mud walled, reinforced with lumps of coral. Some of that has been preserved in the renovated Bastakiya, but only in small patches:



Some of the restoration work looks almost authentic:

But a lot of it doesn't. It's all too neat and tidy, there's far too much very obvious concrete, the footpaths are very modern, even in the narrow alleyway sections:

And a lot of it looks, well, modern:



In a strange way the brand new Old Town at Burj Dubai almost feels more authentically old than Bastakiya:

I wonder what the Bastakiya 'preservation' thinking is.

The old buildings presumably couldn't be renovated and preserved, they weren't bult of material that would lend itself to that. But I think it's a shame that the final finish on the buildings, the veneer, doesn't look older, doesn't look more like the original buildings. The modern paved walkways could have been much more like the original alleyways too.

Having said that, it's still an area well worth a visit. There are plenty of interesting little art galleries, museums, restaurants for example, all housed in the recreated buildings. In that sense the Municipality has done a great job, it's a fascinating area to spend time exploring.

To old Dubai

I went into the city yesterday so I thought I'd give the Metro another go.

I was visiting Bur Dubai and then Deira and with only a few stations currently open there was a bit of walking involved. In this beautiful weather that suited me fine, I've always enjoyed walking and I love wandering around the old areas of Dubai anyway.

I went from Mall of the Emirates to Khalid Bin Al Waleed station (better known as Bank Street or Burjuman), it took twenty minutes and cost Dh6.50. That compares very favourably with driving, especially with the parking problems in the city.



To cross to Deira I wandered down to the Creek and, as I always do, invested a dirham in an abra ride.



Like all cities around the world with old and new sections the old part of Dubai is very different from New Dubai. It's grown naturally rather than being just plonked on some empty land, so it has soul, heart.

It's all a bit jumbled and scruffy in many parts but that's all part of its charm and I always get a lift in spirits being there.



I came back from Union Station and again it's about twenty minutes and costs Dh6.50.

By the way, on the way down to the Creek I walked through Bastakiyah, which I must explore again because there's a lot more going on than last time I was there.

Interesting food available too;

Another stroll down Memory Lane

My postings on Old Dubai are always popular and I've been fossicking around to see what I have with me from my time here in the seventies & eighties.

I've found some more photographs which I'm sorting out and I'll try to post them in the near future.

Meanwhile, I came across a couple of books from the early eighties, which some of you may remember. Both were published by what is now Motivate but then was called What's On Publishing.

This was published in June 1984, written and photographed by another friend, Bob Milne Home, who was then Marketing & Tours Manager at DNATA.

Friendships made in Dubai have lasted I'm pleased to say. Bob's been back in the UK for a long time now but we keep in regular contact. We've visited him in his very nice old cottage in the UK and we also had dinner with him when he visited Dubai a couple of months ago on a short business trip.

He used to write a column in the early 'What's On' magazine and then put together this excellent book.

The other book I found was this one, published in February 1983 and compiled by Bryn Jones, a stalwart of Dubai Radio's Morning Show.

A regular feature of the show was the 'Dubai Diners Delight' segment, which featured recipes sent in by listeners. It was so popular that it was decided to put a selection of the recipes into a book.

In addition to the huge variety of recipes the book carries advertisements which are fascinating to look at. Here's what the Dubai Metropolitan on Sheikh Zayed Road, then simply called Abu Dhabi Road, looked like back then...

Hotels featured strongly in the advertising and here are two familiar landmarks:

Leisure facilities were fewer back then, but a foretaste of what was to come twenty years later...

Dubai's first mall, then known as the largest building in the Middle East, had a favourite children's area...

Other ads give some indication of the lack of sophistication in the advertising industry, because it was still very much pioneering days in the early eighties...

The DNATA book has some excellent photographs, Bob being a very gifted photographer as well as writer.

One of my favourites amongst his thousands of shots is this one of the Trade Centre, then our tallest building and the best known landmark.