Flight Control, Part 1

Dubai International Airport, main concourse, May 1971. The architects Keith Page and Brian Broughton stand right of center in dark suits. Courtesy of Catherine, Fiona, and Jackie Page.

November 8, 2021

Organizers in the United Arab Emirates are concluding the year with a calendar of celebrations, despite everything going on in the world. Expo 2020, cowed by the pandemic last year, successfully opened in late September as perhaps the world’s first global event since lockdowns. More festivities will commence on December 2, when the United Arab Emirates turns fifty.¹

Another fifty-year anniversary this year received little notice—the opening of Dubai’s first major airport terminal, currently known as Terminal 1. Designed by Page & Broughton in 1968–69, it was one of the city’s most expressive manifestations of modern architecture. It still would be, were its original form and function not drastically altered. Upon entering the departures concourse today, you might discover that a shadow of the original design still endures—in remnants of the cream-colored columns that start slender at the base, then flit upward and stretch outward to attach with neighboring columns, resulting in a field of ogee arches.

The manufactured columns continued beyond the terminal as shading and structure of the spiral carousel for transferring luggage between tarmac and lower level service floor, ca. 1971. Courtesy of Catherine, Fiona, and Jackie Page.

The new terminal opened in May 1971, nearly seven months before federation, as if to be online in time to welcome foreign delegates attending the December 2 federation ceremonies. In reality, the rush was a frantic maneuver to protect Dubai’s status as a city of trade and global standards. Business, not politics, fueled Dubai.

This wasn’t Dubai’s first airport terminal. Before that, there was once a depot-like building, appended to a hardened runway. And even before that, a slight jetty once welcomed arrivals who disembarked from the “flying boats” that made a runway out of nearby Dubai Creek.

The ruler of Dubai expressed his eagerness for the 1971 terminal by taking on significant debt, even though his predecessors in the 1930s had evaded a much more modest scheme. That scheme had been pitched by the British government. Rightly so, it was read as a portal to colonial submission, not big-time opportunity. The shirk from Dubai shifted the region’s first airport project to neighboring Sharjah.

By 1959, having observed the advantages an airport brought to Sharjah, local leaders and merchants in Dubai wanted one too. In response to their entreaties, the British officials, who controlled Dubai’s foreign contacts, admittedly “blew hot and cold” on the idea. Not because they wanted to restrict Dubai’s growth, not because they deemed it unnecessary with another runway so close, but because they first wanted Sharjah’s ruler to extend approval for the British military base at the existing airport. Once Dubai had an airport, Sharjah’s major source of income would be relegated to redundancy. Sharjah’s leader knew this, and the British feared his response to the change.

In 1960, construction of Dubai’s first airport runway began, signifying, for some observers, the city’s growing independence. On May 28, 1960, however, the ruler of Dubai signed up to submit Dubai’s airways to Great Britain: He acknowledged that the British government would determine which planes from which cities could land and from where the airport sourced its fuel, all the while absolving Britain of any debt claims. Furthermore, British officials inserted International Aeradio to manage the airport’s flight schedules, essentially linking the airport to existing air traffic–control systems in Britain. They also introduced British engineers from Costain to the project. Successful business in Britain was also successful business in Dubai: Within the first year of operations, Dubai dominated the gold trade in the region.²

The Duff family returns to Dubai. The 1960 airport terminal in background. Photo courtesy of Diana Barnardiston.

Eight years later, the government of Dubai framed the proposed, grander terminal as another defiant gesture, one embodied in glass, concrete, and fiber-reinforced plastic. It was a riposte to an announcement made earlier that year which imperiled Dubai’s tenuous financial and political ecosystem: The British government unilaterally declared its plan to end “truces” with the Trucial States, betraying for the final time that any historical “special relationship” with the emirates was not bilateral. To fill the vacuum of power, the Trucial States were scheduled to shift from a nebulous body under British influence to a UN-recognized nation-state. And because of its oil wealth, Abu Dhabi was designated to become the capital city, to house shiny new government buildings, and to host global diplomacy. Dubai would no longer play its own national anthem.³

In 1971, British government officials were still floundering to secure the terms of federation before deadline. Meanwhile, in stark contrast, British architects and engineers choreographed in Dubai a confident scene of progress, according to plan. The 1971 terminal was also employed to signify resistance, this time in response to Abu Dhabi’s capital status. Unmatched in Abu Dhabi, the project declared Dubai’s engineered ascendancy, just when it was timetabled to fade. At the same time, construction was even more entrenched in British financial interests.

British firm Page & Broughton secured the design commission. Costain, already well established in Dubai, was selected as the civil engineers. And Lloyds Bank provided £4.13 million in financing. None of the British trifecta was exposed to risk, since the loan was guaranteed by the British Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). With ECGD signed on, the project was a no-brainer for private British lenders. The participation of the ECGD made the necessary loan available to Dubai’s ruler, with the stipulation that British firms got the major contracts.

Photograph of the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, and (left) adviser Mahdi Al Tajir flanked by British architect Keith Page (left) and Julian Bullard, the penultimate British political agent before federation. This might be at a groundbreaking ceremony in 1969. Some of the other men in photograph possibly represent Costain. Courtesy of Catherine, Fiona, and Jackie Page.

Dubai International Airport, 1971, as seen from the tarmac runway. Courtesy of Brian Broughton.

In 1966, the Financial Times had observed that British consulting engineers were delivering “airport design all over the world.” Recent projects were tallied at £35 million (today about £555 million): in Hong Kong, Shiraz, Tehran, Abadan, Baghdad, Kuwait, Kuala Lumpur, Freetown, Amman, Doha, Jamaica, Benghazi, and Sebha.

Next stop for this specific form of British expertise: Dubai.⁴

The right amount of political power and a considerable catalogue of materials can indeed be mustered to materialize an assertion, to create a showpiece. What gets shown, what is broadcast, however, is not so easy to control. At the moment when leaders in a new country faced the excitement, and grave uncertainties, of independence; when Dubai’s leadership sought to maintain its exceptional state even as the city-state was folded into a political convention; and when British dominance seemed departed, the airport manifested perhaps the most successful deployment of Britain’s historical strategy in Dubai—to formulate a wealthy, pared-down city-state as an extension of home turf for British consultants. Three years after the opening, the terminal’s facade was draped in Union Jack flags. The oversize concourse hosted Dubai’s largest exhibition at the time, of British construction services and products on sale to a new country.

Read Part 2 here.

The Dubai International Airport was the location for the British Building and Construction Equipment Exhibition, 1974. Union Jack flags were hung on the terminal's glass facade. Large-scale equipment was on display and for sale in the parking lot. Courtesy of John R. Harris Library.

Notes:

¹A young nation made up of much older urban and rural settlements was first crafted into an entity called the Trucial States by British administrators in the 19th century.

²Obtainable documents suggest that a non-British, Doha-based firm, later known as Darwish Consulting Engineers, secured the contracting work for the 1960 airport. This company became an instrumental participant in regional urban development. Darwish’s success in the region is an example of how the British role idealized by the UK government was facing challenges early on.

³There is a reference to Dubai’s national anthem in the BP archives.

⁴Sharman, F. Andrew, “Meeting the Demands of Air Transport,” Financial Times, November 14, 1966. The writer worked for British engineering consulting firm Halcrow.

Please sign up below to receive notice when I’ve posted more about Dubai and its 20th-century transformations. ⬇

This is the fifteenth dispatch around the publication of Showpiece City. You can read the first fourteen: Telephones & Dynamite; A Season of Migrations, West; A Circumscribed World; Gathering at a Roundabout; John Harris Comes to Dubai; and Wild Machines over Dubai; Have Some Fun; Thrown to Stand; A Shipwreck Seen; Crossing as Destination; A Stage for Palestine; Temporary by Degree; City as Exhibition; and Rule of the Road.