As gulf news celebrates its 30th anniversary, we find out what the prominent people in the UAE think about the progress the nation and the newspaper has made
David May has been in Dubai for nearly 30 years and has seen it change from a quiet desert emirate to the shining, high-rise city it is today. During this time he has also been heavily involved in the British Business Group and is Commodore of Dubai's offshore sailing club.
"When I arrived here in 1982, there were about 3,000 British people living in Dubai. And you came to know everybody really quickly," May said.
In 1982, Khansaheb, a civil engineering company where May is Technical Director, had about 300 or 400 staff and four cars. Today it has more than 8,000 staff and about 180 cars.
"Bur Dubai was Dubai then. There was the old Chicago Beach Hotel at the end of Beach Road and you had Dubal and the power station down there. Obviously Jebel Ali port was there, but that was it. Between the beach and the end, it was all beach. You could go on the beach anywhere, you could walk all along the beach," May smiled, "It was absolutely gorgeous."
It seems not only the beach was perfect. "I don't think there was a set of traffic lights in Dubai back in those days. And actually, a friend of mine who was here in the early 70s, before there were any roads, said they followed the driving on the left-hand side of the road, as they did in the UK. That's the way it evolved because most of the cars came from the UK with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. And then one night they decided to change and there were a few accidents where people didn't know which side of the road to drive on. And it didn't really matter because there weren't any road signs, there weren't any roads.
"The first road was, I think, around the centre of Dubai. A friend of mine who used to be in charge of water distribution in Dubai, he was the first guy here who was actually laying roads. There were only two companies with asphalt plants in those days. I saw photographs of when he'd just started, from Port Rashid, laying the first Beach Road. Incredible."
Rolling along
And the business world wasn't besotted with being the next London or New York. Everything just rolled along slowly in the sun.
"Basically, business wasn't so frantic. It was very pleasant to do trade. You worked hard and the conditions were bad but it was quite easy and the pressures weren't on everybody.
"Everything continued growing until 1991 when we had the Gulf War. A lot of people disappeared and just ran and there were only a few of us left doing the work. And from that time, Dubai started growing, growing, growing.
"Of course it carried on at quite a smart, but not too frantic, pace until the early 2000s and then it just…" May exhaled. "Absolutely unbelievable."
For those of us who weren't in Dubai back then, it's hard to imagine a Dubai without Shaikh Zayed Road and all the glamorous hotels. But that's exactly how it was.
"Dubai was only sand between roads when I came here. There weren't many side roads at all. Just Beach Road, Al Wasl Road and a couple of joining roads but anybody who lived in between was down a sand track."
May was involved in building the first mosque in Mirdif in 1985 at a time when there wan't a single building there. "We had to make our own road to get there to build the mosque and we couldn't understand why anyone was building a mosque there."
Pace of development
And as the UAE has developed, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi paving the way, the concern now is that a lack of planning has led to electricity and water shortages.
"I've been following the interest in Ajman and RAK, and Ajman have now said they're going to build a power station. The main thing is that the grid is now being linked throughout the GCC so that you'd be able to get power generated in Saudi Arabia to the UAE and that should alleviate a few of the problems.
"They're laying the cables now, so the whole of the UAE is now linked between the various grids. Some of it has (come into operation) but everybody has a shortage. Dubai has a shortage, Abu Dhabi, I don't think has a shortage yet. But all the other emirates are short. Saudi has tremendous generating power so that would help but doesn't solve the water problem."
Aside from traffic and pollution, many Dubai residents who were here in the 80s believe the social life was better then too.
"I loved it. You knew where to go to meet everybody. There were only three or four places to go to. A lot of those places have gone. Now, you've got to be a member of a beach club or whatever."
Development of not only infrastructure, but also business has generally been faster in Dubai than other emirates and even other cities, a fact May agrees with.
"Look at Gulf News, it has greatly improved to become a paper of international standard. And it's taken on board a civic responsibility."
May said nobody can say where Dubai's growth is headed as it's got to the limits of what it can control.
"Controlling the growth is beyond the capacity of a lot of the people who are involved. Shaikh Mohammad is doing the right thing in diversification of the municipality into different groups, but there still needs to be master-planning. I don't think the authority is there to do it. Planning is being outpaced by the development."
