The village of Rhodes, laid out in September 1891, retains the distinctive Victorian character for which it is now known. As Rhodes Village's own tourism material puts it:
"The entire village has the distinctive Victorian look and feel of yesteryear about it. The combination of its historical value, charm and natural splendour makes Rhodes Village the perfect getaway." — Rhodes Village (2026)
This did not happen by chance. It is the result of a deliberate, decades-long process of heritage protection — one that shifted the village's official designation from "conservation area" to "heritage area" along the way.
The 1987 Conservation Survey
In 1987, Architectural Conservation students from the School of Architecture at the then University of Natal carried out extensive fieldwork in Rhodes, which had been singled out as one of the best-preserved towns in South Africa. Their final report was careful to note that the village's wealth of old houses — with their stoeps and curved corrugated eaves — was not to be treated as a museum piece.
The students surveyed the entire village in detail: buildings, streets, boundaries, trees, and contours, and made proposals for future conservation and development, including spatial use and tourism. Historical houses and other buildings authentic to rural Cape frontier town architecture received particular attention. Conservation was defined in the report as "preservation and controlled change." Of 108 buildings assessed, 76 were eventually listed against exacting criteria.
The project was published that year as Rhodes: towards the conservation of a unique South African town, and gave real momentum to existing local efforts to have Rhodes designated as a conservation area by the National Monuments Council (NMC), then South Africa's national heritage body.
From Application to Designation: 1987–1997
NMC File No. 9/2/007/3 records the full process from application to formal designation:
- The Rhodes Ratepayers and Residents Association (RR&RA) initiated the formal application, working with the Rhodes Transitional Local Council and the Drakensberg Regional Services Council.
- Council approvals were presented to the Eastern Cape NMC.
- In 1992, the Eastern Cape NMC submitted the application to the national body.
- In April 1994, the NMC recommended to the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology that Rhodes be designated a conservation area, together with accompanying by-laws.
The motivation put to the Minister captured what made Rhodes worth protecting:
"Rhodes has an interesting social history and a consistency of building scale and materials, set in a landscape and setting that makes it exceptional. … Rhodes does not have many buildings of 'high architecture' or buildings of outstanding individual merit, but mostly humble dwellings forming a charming and unique picture of a typical turn-of-the-century Eastern Cape town … The designation of Rhodes as a conservation area would further ensure that new development would be guided so as not to destroy the town's unique atmosphere."
By March 1997 — three years after the recommendation — the designation still had not been gazetted. When the RR&RA queried the delay, the NMC explained:
"The National Monuments Council is empowered to designate a conservation area. The Minister, however, has to approve the by-laws and it appears that this approval procedure is responsible for the delay in finalising the matter. The NMC may therefore designate the Rhodes Conservation Area but it may prove a futile exercise, since the real protection lies in the by-laws which safeguard a conservation area against damage, disfigurement, alteration, destruction or defilement and to regulate the conditions of use."
The delay, in other words, was not bureaucratic indifference to Rhodes specifically — it reflected a structural weakness in the designation process itself: an area could be declared protected while the instrument that actually protected it sat unapproved.
1997: Designation and By-Laws
In July 1997, the Rhodes Conservation Area was formally designated by the National Monuments Council under Section 5(9) of the National Monuments Act (Act 28 of 1969). By-laws were published simultaneously, closing the gap the NMC had flagged four months earlier.
The designated area was described as:
"The Rhodes Village, together with all the side-walks and road surfaces of Main, Sauer, Muller, Naude, Vorster, Ross, Bell and Church Streets, and including all the erven with historical buildings thereon, namely Erven [1–285]."
— Government Notice 981, Government Gazette No. 18152:2, 25 July 1997
Notably, Visser Street itself is not named, though the erven adjoining it are included.
From Conservation Area to Heritage Area
The National Heritage Resources Act (Act 25 of 1999) replaced the National Monuments Act (1969). Under the NHRA, conservation areas designated under Section 5(9) of the earlier Act became heritage areas by operation of law (Section 58.11(c)), on grounds that include environmental or cultural interest or the presence of heritage resources (Section 31(5)).
Rhodes Heritage Area is therefore the correct name today. The South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) has since replaced the NMC as the national heritage authority.
Did You Know?
- Rhodes Heritage Area covers the entire village as laid out in 1891. By contrast, larger centres such as Cape Town, Kimberley and Bloemfontein have only portions of their historic footprints under heritage designation.
- Declared a National Monument in 1987, the old Rhodes School is now a Provincial Heritage Site within the Rhodes Heritage Area — though its erven (285/6) sit outside the main 1891 grid.
- As of September 2026, Rhodes is the only heritage area listed for the Eastern Cape.
Sally Schramm is a retired research librarian, with a career that included positions at the South African Library in Cape Town and the Cory Library at Rhodes University in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown). She holds a BA in African History and Social Anthropology. Postgraduate qualifications are an Honours in Library and Information Science (UCT) and the Programme in Archival Studies (UNISA). Heritage Conservation, and Introduction to Museology, were short courses taken through the Stellenbosch University Museum. These courses were presented in conjunction with Historical Homes of South Africa Limited. When head of the Margaret Smith Library at the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB), she completed the Heritage Digital Campus (Africa Media Online) and workshops by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperatively digitise the legacy literature of biodiversity, making this available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons". The Margaret Smith Library is a founding member of BHL: Africa. As a part-time resident of Rhodes Village near Barkly East, she previously chaired the Rhodes Aesthetics Committee.