The coral city of old Jeddah.

Old Jeddah is one of Saudi Arabia's best-kept secrets, hidden away behind the new office blocks and shopping malls of the Red Sea city. Only foreigners working in the Kingdom can visit it, because the country is not open to tourists, which adds to the sense of secrecy. In the old days Muslim pilgrims would disembark at the Customs House, walk up through the narrow streets. and out through the Mecca gate on their way to the holy cities. Today they fly in to the new airport, to the east Jeddah, and take the motor-way.

In 1947 Jeddah was still a medieval walled port, covering no more than 1.5 sq km. Inside its walls lay the mosques, souks and serais typical of a small Muslim town, but what distinguished it were the tower houses, built of coral blocks, with elaborate wooden balconies. It is a place of great antiquity, an important town on the pre-Islamic trade routes between India and the Mediterranean. By the tenth century, it was described as `fortified and well populated. The people are traders and are wealthy. the town is Mecca's treasury and Yemen's and Egypt's emporium.'

With the coming of oil money in the'70s, the merchants from the coral houses began moving out to new western-style houses along the sea front and into the surrounding desert. By 1993 Jeddah covered 560 sq km. and is still expanding rapidly today. It now has the longest corniche in the world, and probably the grandest. The city walls were demolished in the late 1940s, and used as landfill.

Yet a substantial amount of the old town, called `Al-Balad', still remains a flawed architectural gem. There are a few unsympathetic intrusions by office blocks but these have at least followed the narrow, winding street patterns inside the vanished walls. Today Al-Balad is almost a ghost town. The inhabitants simply closed the shutters and locked the doors of their old houses when they left during the 1980s. It is eerily quiet for an Eastern city, with only a handful of small, Indian-run shops, a few poor immigrant families, and tribes of skinny alley cats. It is also one of the cleanest cities, since the earthen streets were paved with polished granite a few years ago.

For the majority of Saudis, new means good. Buildings are not cherished simply because they are old. Only recently, extensive fourteenth-century structures around the Kaa'ba at Mecca were demolished, without protest, to provide better facilities for pilgrims. The heritage industry has not yet been born here and the bazaars are full of treasures discarded by nomadic people over the past 20 years as they rapidly become urbanised. All of old Tai, the summer capital to the north of Jeddah, has gone. That so much of Al-Balad remains is due mainly to a former city mayor, Mohammed Farsi, who introduced the foreign concept of listing buildings of historic interest. He fought to conserve old Jeddah when he realised it was the only substantial remaining example of Red Sea architecture in Saudi Arabia.

The unusual height of the old coral houses, four or five storeys, was primarily a response to climatic conditions. Only at roof level could the cooling north-west sea breezes be caught and enjoyed. The highest rooms are often little more than sitting spaces shaded by screens of palm. But it is the wooden windows and balconies that are the chief glory of old Jeddah. Called `rowshans', they hang on the white walls like beehives, and are as intricately constructed. They are made up from thousands of small pieces of wood, jigsawed together because timber was scarce in a desert country. Carpenters used what they could get, creating three-dimensional screens against the sun that allowed the breeze to filter through. Inside the houses, window seats were used as beds during the summer nights and women could sit here unseen, during the day, gossiping to neighbours across the narrow alleys. Mortar was made from pulverised coral, and lime. Imported teak, from India or Burma, was used horizontally to reinforce the exterior load-bearing walls. Huge pottery jars in wooden stands on the balconies held drinking water, cooled by evaporation.

Curiously. these houses have shallow foundations and no cellars. This. coupled with their height, and the friable, porous nature of the coral blocks, means that they can occasionally, simply collapse into a heap of rubble. A house fire means certain demolition. This is why Al-Balad, despite its appearance of antiquity, actually has few houses more than 200 years old. One eighteenth-century house, with the finest rowshan, hanging on by its teeth, is today only a facade, and can probably not be saved.

The interiors are a warren of split-levels and half landings leading off the main stairwell, which acts as an airshaft. Unlike the majority of Arabian houses these have no central courtyards. The separation between the men's and the women's quarters is vertical, not horizontal. Men used the entrance hall and main reception room at ground level, while the women kept to the upper floors, although little lattices and screens allowed them to look down into the hall, without being seen. Kitchens were usually on the top floor, the coolest part of the house. In the lower rooms. traces of intricate painted decoration still remain on wooden ceilings and doors, echoing the patterns of carpets that hung on the walls. When the evening lanterns were lit, and frankincense burnt in braziers, each house was like a little palace.

In the face of neglect and uninterest in old Jeddah's houses, Sami Angawi, a Saudi architect trained in Texas, is dedicated to saving and revitalising Al-Balad. A romantic but practical man who wears traditional Arab dress, he has set up his office in a rehabilitated house in the old city and has established the Amar Centre for Architectural Heritage from his own funds. Behind an elaborately carved door, a former reception room houses a modern electronic office. Thousands of images on laser discs can be computer-sorted into types of doorways, rowshans and other features. Ugly modern additions, such as external air conditioners on old houses, can be magically removed on screen to show the conservationist what can be achieved. Angawi has designed and built a small conference centre adjacent to his office, specifically for architectural meetings. His architectural students at Jeddah's King Abdulaziz University have proposed schemes for revitalising the old souk.

Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, there were many more houses in the old City that could have been saved, but which were either demolished for offices, or simply died from lack of care. Apart from Angawi's work, rehabilitation has begun slowly, with the restoration of a few showpieces such as the `Artists' House and Gallery'. The Jeddah Historic Area Preservation Department, supported by the Royal Family, is gradually renovating another old building as its headquarters.

Archaeological excavations in the city centre have recently uncovered a well-preserved system of water conduits with substantial coral block arches and marble facings, fine enough to make into a big attraction for visitors. Sami Nawar, director of the Preservation Department, who conducted the excavation, believes that there is now enough interest and good will to conserve the old city, without many more losses. Ironically he notes that the paving of the streets, of which the municipality were so proud a decade ago, has forced underlying moisture up into the ground floors of the coral walls, which are becoming waterlogged. The paving may have to come up, a salutary lesson for the new conservationists, but an indication of the new-found determination to save this unique city.