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I was walking along the Embankment looking across the Thames at the high-rise London skyline last year. I stopped off at Southwark Cathedral and had a bite to eat at the Cathedral's cafe and gift shop. Later, I wandered on, past the Globe Theatre and on to many other sights and places.

I noticed that the new style of outdoor chairs used by the cafes and eateries were bright slatted aluminium. Most of the time, the voices around me were those of English speakers with typically English [or Scottish, or Welsh] regional accents. Or they were foreign speaking, with non-English lilts and cadences.

I was walking past the new Oriental cafe on Par-la-Ville Road. I saw the same style of bright slatted aluminium chairs and for a few moments, I heard, all round me, the voices of English speakers who spoke with the regional accents of England and Scotland.

I looked about me. I looked up. I looked up and saw a whole street so full of high-rise buildings that I seemed, for a moment, to be standing in a metropolis that was thousands of miles away. For those fleeting moments, I thought, I felt, that I was not in Bermuda. That I was somewhere else. Thousands of miles away. Not here. Not in my Bermuda.

My Bermuda seems to have changed.

My Bermuda has changed. Bermudiana Road might now be re-named Insurance Row. Par-la-Ville Road could become Canyon Road. And Front Street? HSBC Avenue. Those name changes would reflect reality. A reality no different than the reality that caused Bermudiana Road to be named Bermudiana Road.

Martian invasion

Across the water, looking at Hamilton from Harbour Road in Paget, seeing the tower cranes lurking over the Hamilton skylines, I'm reminded of depictions of H G Well's alien machines as they stalked the cities in his sci-fi tale of the 'War of the Worlds'. Some of those tower cranes - there are six machines - stand over the cityscape just as those Martian machines did. As those cranes help to alter the skyline, they're having the same life-changing impact on Bermudians.

The combination of the effects and results of the changes in our Bermudian landscape and people-scape are increasingly obvious. Perhaps the biggest change is that the hotel industry once housed the majority of its foreign workers in hotel dormitories.

However, this new industry coupled with the disappearance of five large hotels and the wholesale population shift to IB workers has resulted in the inter-mingling of these IB workers within Bermuda's ordinary housing stock and amongst Bermuda's ordinary population.

Not only that, but the freer and better-paid workers who keep IB going also have entertainment and social needs that are different from those hotel workers who tended to live a more confined and cloistered existence.

In all, and much as in H G Well's story, there's been a 'War of the Worlds' in Bermuda. Judging by the continuing rise of high-rises, and the brand-new plan to build a mini-skyscraper, replete with aerial walkways and underground parking, in the Par-la-Ville parking lot, we'll be taking yet one more giant step into the future. One more tower crane will rise, one more high-rise building will go up, one more irrevocable shift in Bermuda's ambience.

Bermudians though, appear to be not as fully engaged in this continuing building and IB expansion. This Bermudian reality, coupled with Bermuda's smallness and unique socio-economic fragility, means that those responsible for overseeing and managing Bermuda's future - and I sometimes wonder who they are - need to pay strong attention to the requirement to maintain social stability.

Social stability underpins all economic effort. Remove it, and instantly, economies begin to shrink as businessmen pull in their investments, sell off their investments, or just walk away and write-off the loss against this year's bottom-line.

Bermuda's social stability will be threatened - perhaps is threatened now - by what I sense is a growing gap between IB and its special needs; and the ability of the people of Bermuda - right across Bermuda's whole racial and demographic span - to meet the special demands placed on our population by IB.

We could be heading for a clash of the Worlds in Bermuda. Not a clash between machines and people as in H G Well's story. Instead, a clash between shut-out Bermudians and let-in non-Bermudians.

It's the demonstrable existence of the shut-out Bermudian factor that bothers me.[[In-content Ad]]

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