Banjul trading post and base, constructing houses and barracks for controlling entrance to the Gambia estuary and suppressing the slave trade. The British renamed Banjul Island as St. Mary's Island and named the new town Bathurst, after the 3rd Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies at the time. Streets were laid out in a modified grid pattern, and named after Allied generals at the Battle of Waterloo. The town became the centre of British activity in the Gambia Colony and Protectorate. After independence, the town's name was changed to Banjul in 1973. On 22 July 1994, Banjul
The Capital of the Ruins in 1986 by Eoin O'Brien in "The Beckett Country", and later that same year in "As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers". It is also collected in Beckett's "Complete Short Prose 1929–1989", published in 1995. The Capital of the Ruins "The Capital of the Ruins" is a short piece of reportage by Samuel Beckett written in 1946. Originally written for broadcast by Irish radio, it deals with the Irish hospital in St. Lô. The title of the piece derives from a booklet of photographs of the bombed-out city entitled "St.