My Arabian home for two years in the mid-Eighties was a spacious apartment above Hamdan Street, the main shopping strip of Abu Dhabi, fast-growing federal capital of the United Arab Emirates.

I revelled in views on three sides: to the teeming Indian shanty-town behind, now razed, to busy Hamdan Street five floors below, reawakening from its midday torpor in the cool of dusk; and a glimpse of the glittering, shallow waters of the Arabian Gulf (never call it Persian!), alive with shoals of sailfish.

Until the early Sixties Abu Dhabi was an impoverished fishing village clinging to a barren sand spit. At that time, older residents remembered vividly the days before petroleum, when Abu Dhabi – named Home of the Gazelle by an early Bedouin hunting party – comprised a single mud fort and a cluster of palm thatch huts, populated by miserably-poor pearl divers.

Returning after fourteen years I found a more mature, settled city, minus many of its adolescent pimples. Returning again in 2010 and 2012, I recognised almost nothing of the city I thought I knew. Saddened to learn the Mainland Hash House Harriers (MH3) are no more, but the Emirates Natural History Group, the impetus for so many excursions out into the desert, goes from from strength to strength.

These images are all scans from much-handled 35mm negative and transparency stock.