The King’s Foundation should have an exit strategy

Jul 17, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Georgetown bears the name of King George III, the British monarch during whose reign the settlement acquired increasing importance as the administrative and commercial center of what would become British Guiana. Whatever history’s judgment of empire, the name “Georgetown” reminds us of our colonial heritage.

Unfortunately, after the British left, those who succeeded them had no clue as to how to administer a city. They had instead a more perverted idea of the concept civic order.

The independent rulers of Guyana learnt nothing from their former colonial masters as to how a city survives. Had they, they would have appreciated that a city does so not because it has buildings that remind us of our past. A city survives because someone, every single day, insists that drains must be cleaned, pavements kept clear, markets regulated and public spaces protected from private encroachment.

It is understandable that the King’s Foundation should feel a sentimental and historical interest in Georgetown. The connection is obvious. A city named after a British king naturally invites the curiosity of an institution dedicated to preserving heritage and promoting sustainable urban regeneration. The intention is admirable. The diagnosis, unfortunately, is incomplete.

For Georgetown is not a city suffering from a shortage of restoration plans. It suffers from a shortage of good governance.

One can restore architectural masterpieces, repaint colonial buildings, redo avenues and redesign public squares. One can produce glossy architectural drawings, commission consultants and hold meetings about urban renewal. Yet these become little more than elaborate stage props if the underlying civic disorder remains untouched.

Restoration without reform is simply expensive nostalgia. The central contradiction confronting the King’s Foundation is one that should be apparent within days of walking through the city.

The Government may finance projects. It may construct roads, rehabilitate buildings, renovate, rebuild markets and spruce up the avenues and invite international partners. But Georgetown remains legally and practically under the authority of the Mayor and City Council.

It is under decades of that municipal administration that the city descended into its present condition. Unless the institutional failures that produced the decline are corrected, every restored building risks becoming another well-painted structure standing amid continuing disorder.

Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than at Stabroek Market. The fencing of portions of Stabroek Square has attracted attention, but fencing is cosmetic. It addresses appearance rather than function. The real issue is that commercial activity has migrated beyond the market’s walls. Pavements, roadways and surrounding spaces have become the market itself.

The consequence is entirely predictable. Why should shoppers venture into the building when vendors line every approach outside? Why maintain an organised marketplace when disorder proves more profitable? The market is not failing because of its architecture. It is failing because its boundaries have ceased to exist.

The same lesson applies to Bourda Market. Plans to rebuild it may produce an impressive structure, but impressive structures do not create functioning markets. Walk through Bourda today. Too many internal stalls remain shuttered while commercial life clings almost exclusively to the roadside frontage. The building has become secondary to the pavement and parapets. Reconstruction without restoring proper commercial order merely reproduces failure.

The city tells the same story everywhere. Drains emit foul odours not because drainage engineering has suddenly become impossible but because maintenance has become intermittent. Public spaces accumulate disorder because enforcement retreats. Congestion worsens because transport hubs proliferate wherever convenience defeats planning. Commercial premises multiply without sufficient regard for zoning or infrastructure. The cumulative effect is not merely inconvenience. It is the slow erosion of the idea that rules govern urban life at all.

Cities rarely collapse dramatically. They decay through thousands of tolerated exceptions.

One vendor today becomes fifty tomorrow. One illegal parking area becomes an established terminal. One neglected drain becomes the accepted condition of an entire ward.

Eventually disorder ceases to appear exceptional. It becomes normal. No restoration programme can overcome that reality.

What Georgetown requires is not another master plan but a recovery of municipal authority. It requires clear zoning regulations that are consistently enforced rather than selectively remembered. It requires removing roadside and pavement vending from areas where formal markets already exist. It requires relocating bus parks and informal parking facilities away from already congested commercial districts. It requires regular maintenance of drainage systems before they become public health hazards rather than after they become political embarrassments.

None of these measures is glamorous. Yet they are precisely the unromantic disciplines from which successful cities are made. This is why the King’s Foundation should reconsider its involvement.

Not because Georgetown is beyond saving, but because it cannot be rescued by heritage projects alone. A restoration campaign undertaken before fundamental governance reforms is rather like restoring the grand staircase of a house while ignoring the cracked foundation beneath it. Visitors admire the polish briefly before noticing the walls continue to sink.

History deserves preservation. Heritage deserves respect. But neither can substitute for competent administration.

The greatest tribute to King George would not be another restoration blueprint bearing royal patronage. It would be the re-establishment of a city in which markets function as markets, pavements belong to pedestrians, drains carry water instead of refuse, traffic moves according to plan rather than improvisation, and municipal laws are enforced without apology.

Until those fundamentals return, Georgetown does not need another restoration. It needs a recovery of civic discipline.

Without that recovery, even the noblest intentions of the King’s Foundation will become another chapter in Georgetown’s long history of beautiful plans defeated by untidy realities.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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• British Guiana, British monarch, King George III, King’s Foundation, Peeping Tom

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