The sign says: “Welcome to the Eighth Wonder of the World”. It’s 8am and I am standing on the Gateway Bridge, which links mainland Dubai to Palm Jumeirah, a giant artificial island, in the shape of a palm tree, in the Arabian Gulf.

I am the first journalist to make it to the centrepiece of the emirate’s efforts to build itself – literally – onto the map. At first sight, it’s hardly up there with the pyramids. The Palm, like much of the rest of Dubai, is still a building site. The air is so thick with dust, it’s like breathing muesli, while the swish of the waves running up the beach is drowned out by the heavy drone of pile-drivers.

Almost six years after work began, more than 6,000 of the 8,000 homes planned for the Palm are still being built, along with 32 hotels, a shopping centre and a 60-storey Trump Tower. An army of Asian labourers toil in the 40C heat to finish the Signature villas, which sell for £2m and upward. The neighbours will include David and Victoria Beckham, Becks’s England teammates Michael Owen and Gary Neville, and the former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher – though they didn’t pay anything like that amount.

Yet, when the razzle-dazzle residents and ordinary investors finally get the keys to what is described as “the most envied address in the world”, they may be in for a disappointment. Nakheel, the developer, marketed the Palm – which consists of a trunk, a crown with 17 fronds and a surrounding breakwater crescent island – with a scale model showing stylish apartment blocks and spacious villas on large plots. The reality is a bit different. With their fake turrets and palm-tree-shaped window frames, the caramel-coloured Shoreline apartments, on the trunk, look like cheap-and-not-so-cheerful Vegas mini-hotels. Inside, the £1m duplex penthouses have great views over the Arabian Sea – but only if you peer through the poky windows.

Buyers, most of whom are from overseas, will have to get their own cooker, dishwasher and fridge before they can make so much as a cup of tea. Basic features such as shower curtains are also missing. It doesn’t get much better outside. The sand on the beach, dredged from the ocean floor, is grey and coarse. There is one swimming pool for every four blocks, which house 800 adults, plus children, between them. Expect dawn raids for a poolside lounger during peak season. The promised canal, along the length of the trunk, is nowhere to be seen.

Worst of all, the neighbours can look down on you from their newer, swankier properties. Residents in the £9m Damac Properties Signature Series flats, part of the 82-storey Ocean Heights skyscraper in Dubai Marina, for example, stare straight onto the Palm.

From the Shoreline apartments, I start to drive along the Golden Mile to one of the leafy fronds, but the traffic is backed up. If a handful of construction lorries can bring the place to a standstill, what is going to happen at 7am on a Sunday morning, the first day of the working week in the Middle East, when more than half of the Palm’s estimated 60,000 residents leave to drive to work or take their children to school on the mainland?

One of the residents who will be spending more time on the road than he bargained for is Andy Dukes, 43, who left St Albans to move into the less than romantically named Garden Villa E29. The IT entrepreneur spent £800,000 on the five-bedroom house, and has also bought a £200,000 Shoreline apartment. He insists he is happy with his investment. Prices, it is true, have doubled since the Palm was launched five years ago and, according to local estate agents, show no sign of weakening, especially those for villas.

Dukes concedes that there are problems: his villa is so close to his neighbours that splashes from their pool come over his fence. The houses that stretch from one end of the frond to the other are so tightly packed that “it’s a bit regimented”. The interior, with gold light switches on a brushed steel wall, is a “bit glitterball”.

With few bars, nightclubs or restaurants open, Palm Jumeirah is “culture-free”, and Dukes admits that he feels “a bit guilty” sitting back and enjoying his desert El Dorado while sun-dried labourers, who earn a few dollars a day, work 24/7 around him.

Back at Nakheel’s sales office, the company spokesman, Aaron Richardson, 29, from Leicester, admits the development is late, and that key features such as the canal have been scrapped. He says Nakheel will import white sand to brighten the beaches.

But he denies that the marketing model misled buyers. It was “merely a design concept”. Buyers’ contracts gave the exact size of their villa, and grounds are “way above the worldwide average for beach-front property”. Average? That is hardly the kind of word you would use to describe a £1 billion development.

Yet average it is. Dredging the sea bed to create a 12-square-mile island is an audacious achievement. But by building cookie-cutter apartments and villas, Nakheel may have risked reducing its promised “extraordinary project of epic proportions” to a Middle Eastern Milton Keynes with palm trees.

www.nakheel.com

Next stop the world

Buoyed by its success in selling property on Palm Jumeirah, Nakheel announced two similar – but larger – island projects off the coast of Dubai.

Next up is Palm Jebel Ali. Due to be completed next year, it will be half as big again as Palm Jumeirah, with six marinas, a water theme park and water homes built on stilts between the fronds and the crescent. The largest of the three is Palm Deira, which will span 31 square miles and contain 8,000 two-storey townhouses, as well as marinas, shopping malls, sports facilities and clubs. It is due for completion in 2015.

The Palms are not to be confused with the World, a man-made archipelago of 300 islands in the shape of a map of the world, which is being built 2½ miles off the coast, near Palm Jumeirah. It is expected to be finished next year.

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