Back to the Sea Clifford Holliday and the Building of the Government Estate and Kingsway Boulevard in British Mandatory Haifa

Abstract

In 1923, at the onset of the British Mandate for Palestine, the British launched their largest infrastructural project in the Middle East, a modern harbor in Haifa, which turned the coastal city into their stronghold on the Eastern Mediterranean. This engineering feat was the product of an avaricious instrumental, technocratic appetite, which ignored the existing town. We argue, drawing on previously uncovered historical documents, that the architects and urban planners, which were commissioned to plan the Government Estate on reclaimed sea land abutting the harbor, recognized the detrimental effect of the harbor’s location on the town, potentially degrading it to “the level of a fifth rate Marseilles.” The Estate consequently became a battleground between conflicting developmental and urban interests, with its formative Kingsway Boulevard performing as a critical architectural act of remedy, which salvaged the existing city from a destiny as an industrial service town and restored its civic standing.