This year's annual Heritage Exhibition, staged in the Bermuda Society of Arts gallery at City Hall, celebrates the bicentennial of Hamilton.

A large photographic display, carefully assembled by the Bermuda Archives' John Adams and Carla Hayward, relates the absorbing and well-documented story of a township whose site was determined by its central location alongside a long and sheltered natural harbour.

Its gradual rise to pre-eminence over the old capital of St. George's and its transformation from makeshift port to international business centre (with a period of civilisation in between when Hamilton was a town that was actually lived in) is recorded through a panoramic succession of well-preserved and chronologically arranged images.

Since the Act of Incorporation took place in 1793 (and there is a page of this document, written in now faded brown ink) some time before the advent of photography, there are facsimiles of prints and watercolours, recording those earliest days. Probably the most striking of these is Thomas Driver's still-colourful painting of the town, viewed from the old Court House, in 1834, when the buildings were extremely sparse, the green landscape shorn of its cedars which had been hacked down to meet the demand for ship-building.

There is also an oils portrait of Captain Henry Hamilton, Governor of the time for whom the new town was named.

The Age of Steam, covering a period from around 1850 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, saw the beginnings of the Island's tourist industry and this section of the show is highlighted by some fascinating studies of those earliest visitors. "Steamer Day'' perhaps captures best of all the excitement scarcely concealed by Bermudians when the cumbersome vessels brought increasing numbers of visitors to their shores. It shows a group of men and women crowded around what is now No. 1 Shed, gazing expectantly seaward and clad in formal Victorian attire, the only concessions to the climate being a plethora of straw hats and umbrellas.

There are scenes, too, of the lavish celebrations staged by Hamilton on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. But even as the new age of the 20th century dawned, Hamilton still had a distinctly rural air; there is a view of North Street at Dutton Avenue, for instance, which reveals it as a wild country lane, while the Pembroke Canal, running through meadows and edged by flowering bushes, still resembled an altogether prettier country stream.

The exhibition reminds us that Hamilton, before the rest of the Island was opened up, first by the railway and then by the car, was for a long time Bermuda's principal residential section. Solid, verandahed houses were often set in substantial gardens and those of the Harveys of Victoria Street and the Robinsons of Princess and Court Streets are singled out for photographic attention.

Moments when Hamilton's history became entwined with the rest of the world's are shown in scenes of Bermuda's volunteer soldiers going off to fight the First World War, and there are photographs recording the visit of the Prince of Wales, an event which brought the whole of Hamilton to a standstill.

A sober reminder of the power of hurricanes is illustrated by the one that struck the town in 1926, with some dramatic shots of the Secretariat, Alexandrina Lodge and the Colonial Opera House all showing severe structural damage.

There are some beautiful pictures of the Ocean Monarch and the Queen of Bermuda , which more than any liners since, became an integral part of the life of Hamilton. There are several pictures, too, of another milestone event in the life of the town. This was the introduction of the Bermuda railway which transformed the appearance of Front Street as it wended its way up and down, causing horses, carts and bicyclists to scatter in its wake.

But there are hints, in this penultimate section, of the modern age, when air transportation made its first appearance in the form of sea-planes landing in Hamilton harbour and the alien sight of American jeeps driven by US servicemen along Front Street in 1942.

The final section (1945 -- Post-War Prosperity) highlights the rush to "progress'' through the demolition of most of Hamilton's gracious old houses and landmarks, notably the distinctive Tower Building on the corner of Reid and Burnaby Streets (where the Bank of Butterfield now stands), the Opera House, the Hamilton Hotel (removed by a raging fire, with Will Onions' gleaming white City Hall subsequently rising from its ashes) and the railway tunnel at Par-La-Ville.

We can only wonder what future generations will make of this full-scale plunder of Hamilton's architectural past, especially when they study the photographs of what replaced it, as the little city frantically attempted to come to grips with the demands of international business. There is an appropriately large photographic study of the Bank of Bermuda, the building of which brought about the permanent disfigurement of Albuoy's Point and the Hamilton waterfront during the 1960s.

Adjacent to this special Heritage Show, which is a must for anyone remotely interested in Hamilton's history, is another Hamilton-inspired display. This is the Annual Secondary Schools Photographic Exhibition. Focussing their lenses on the buildings and people of present-day Hamilton, these students have come up with some superb work that captures the life of the city from both an aesthetic and social standpoint. This, too, is well worth a visit. -- Patricia Calnan BROWSING THROUGH HISTORY -- The Heritage Exhibition at City Hall.