MIRI: When I first learned to walk the streets of Miri, the city felt like a small town that knew its own story. Every lane, jetty and cinema held a chapter.
Today those chapters are being rewritten. Not always badly, but often in ways that make the past harder to read.
This is not a sentimental lament for the sake of nostalgia. It is a close look at how a city that grew out of a single well in 1910 is losing physical traces of that growth.
People who once used those places as landmarks now rely on photographs and memory. For a community that has been built and rebuilt around oil, shipping and commerce, the slow disappearance of familiar structures raises a simple question: what should be kept and why?
The refinery that left a hole
One of the most literal losses in Miri’s civic memory was the Lutong refinery. Once a symbol of industrial modernity for northern Sarawak, the refinery was decommissioned in the early 2000s and dismantled soon after.
For decades it had been both employer and landmark, an industrial spine that anchored communities around Lutong.
When the plant closed and the steel and tanks were taken down, what remained was an absence you could walk into.
The physical removal of the refinery did not just take away infrastructure. It erased an orientation point for local narratives about how Miri became what it is.
Preserving industrial heritage is difficult everywhere. Old plants are often contaminated, privately owned, or deeply unfashionable in planning circles.
Yet the loss of the Lutong complex is a reminder that industrial sites are also cultural assets. Scholars who have looked at Miri’s industrial past argue that the city has an overlooked heritage that deserves a conservation strategy rather than wholesale clearance.
The long jetty that folded into the sea
If you asked anyone over 60 to point to the most dramatic change on Miri’s waterfront, they would likely mention the Long Jetty.
Built to service early offshore operations, the jetty once stretched far into the sea and served as a visual and social terminus for the town.
By the turn of the century, it had been dismantled to make way for land reclamation and the reshaping of the peninsula that forms the modern marina.
Where fishermen once used timber planks to step out over the water, there is now reclaimed land and a different skyline.
People still tell stories about the mile-long walkway and the way light used to fall on it at dusk. The jetty’s physical removal changed how the city meets the sea.
That loss matters because waterfronts are public memory banks. They collect daily routines and epochal events in equal measure.
When they are altered wholesale, the stored memories are harder to access.
There have been petitions and conversations about rebuilding or commemorating the Long Jetty but reconstruction can never quite recover the original texture of lives that were stitched to its planks.
Theatres, cinemas and the vanishing of shared time
Across the downtown, another kind of erasure took place at a smaller, more intimate scale: the demolition of old cinemas and theatres to make way for malls and plazas.
Places like Miri Theatre and other single-screen cinemas were hubs of communal time.
A Saturday film was a ritual. Those auditoria were where teenagers felt first taste of the wider world and where families measured time by matinees and premieres.
Many of those venues were either retrofitted or removed entirely during the commercial reshaping of the 1980s and 1990s.
In some cases, the old facades and balconies gave way to modern retail designs.
The substitution of a shared public ritual with private consumption points to a broader cultural shift.
When we lose a theatre, we lose a place where an entire neighbourhood once synchronized its evenings.
What remains: The Grand Old Lady and contested monuments
Not all of Miri’s icons have vanished. The Grand Old Lady, the rust-coloured derrick on Canada Hill, endures.
The well that started it all has been preserved and turned into a site of commemoration, with a small museum that tells the story of the city’s birth as an oil town.
For many residents, the Grand Old Lady is proof that preservation is possible. It is a physical bridge between a century past and the present.
But keeping one monument is not the same as asking strategic questions about a city’s entire inventory of meaningful places.
Which buildings should be conserved? Who pays? How do we balance public memory and private investment?
These are questions beyond sentiment and they require civic mechanisms that are not always in place in growing towns.
Why landmarks matter and to whom
Landmarks are more than tourism props. They function as anchors for identity, orientation and social belonging.
For long-time residents, a corner pharmacy or a cinema is shorthand for family histories, for daily routines and for social networks.
For newcomers, they are teaching moments that stitch strangers into local stories. Erasing them reshapes identity in ways political maps rarely register.
Practical considerations complicate any straightforward preservation ethic. Old structures may be unsafe.
Land is expensive. Developers propose new uses that promise jobs and economic growth. Local government officials negotiate between preservationists and investors. The result is often compromise, which in practice means partial preservation, plaques, and heritage corners rather than comprehensive conservation.
Small acts of memory
If wholesale preservation is politically and economically hard, smaller gestures can keep memory alive.
Oral history projects, community photo archives, and modest plaques at sites where buildings once stood are part of a civic toolkit.
In Miri, volunteer groups and local historians have compiled collections of photographs and testimonies.
These collections, often stored in modest local repositories or shared online, become public memory banks that compensate for the slow disappearance of physical markers.
Social media groups dedicated to Miri’s history play a surprising role in surfacing photographs and crowdsourced recollections.
There is also room for creative re-use. Industrial pasts can be interpreted as cultural assets.
Former workshops can become studios. Dockside spaces can be repurposed as open-air museums.
When that happens, the past becomes layered into the present and places become palimpsests rather than blank slates.
A civic argument for deliberate preservation
Cities change and they must. Growth and renewal produce social benefit. But deliberate, planned preservation is also an investment in civic literacy.
A city that keeps a record of its past in visible form is a city that teaches its children how it became itself. That matters for tourism, yes, but also for a sense of civic continuity.
The challenge is to make preservation neither ornamental nor exclusively nostalgic. It must be practical, purposeful and accessible.
Miri has shown it can preserve a piece of its past. The Grand Old Lady stands as a visible testament. The question now is whether that success becomes a pattern or a lonely exception.
What a future that remembers might look like
Imagine a waterfront where a rebuilt interpretation of the Long Jetty sits beside a reclaimed plaza.
Imagine adaptive reuse projects that turn old administrative buildings into community galleries and oral history centres.
Imagine a modest fund that supports the maintenance of structures with strong local resonance, combined with a digital archive that lets anyone search for photos, names and stories.
These are not grand pipe dreams. They are governance choices.
Ultimately, a city chooses what it wishes to carry forward. The erasure of a refinery, the absence of a mile-long jetty, the demolition of a theatre are not just engineering or commercial decisions.
They are decisions about what kind of historical literacy a community will have.
Miri’s story is still being written. We can see chapters that have already been torn from the book. The long, patient work of preservation is not glamorous.
It is argument, document, negotiation and, sometimes, a stubborn refusal to let a single important building disappear without a good reason.
In that work lies a city’s refusal to lose its map of itself.
