The Siege Bell & Lower Barrakka

The colonnaded temple was unveiled in 1992 by Queen Elizabeth II, fifty years after the island's award of the George Cross. The bell inside is the largest in Malta.

Facing the water beneath the bell, Michael Sandle's bronze catafalque carries the figure of a dead serviceman. Nothing about it is heroic. It is a body, laid out, facing the sea.

For two years the island lay squarely on the route between Italian ports and the German and Italian armies in North Africa, and neither side was in any doubt about what followed from that. More than three thousand air raids were flown against Malta. By the spring of 1942 they were arriving on most days, and the bulk of the tonnage went into this harbour and the dockyard around it.

Food ran to within weeks of surrender.

Fourteen merchant ships left Gibraltar in August 1942 under heavy escort, in the operation code-named Pedestal. Nine of them never arrived.

Everything depended on the tanker Ohio and the fuel in her hull. She was bombed, torpedoed, set alight and hit by a crashing aircraft, and in the end two destroyers were lashed either side of her to drag her the last of the way. She entered the Grand Harbour on 15 August with the sea washing over her decks, and the city came down onto these bastions to watch it.

A hundred metres further on, the Lower Barrakka Gardens hold a small neoclassical temple to Sir Alexander Ball. He commanded the British naval effort that supported the Maltese in driving the French out in 1800, and his tomb is in the bastion below the monument. The view from it takes in the harbour mouth, the breakwater and the open sea, with a kilometre of city at your back that exists because of what happened in 1565.