Brett McDougall

Which of our city’s architectural treasures don’t receive the credit they deserve? During lockdown we explored Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings on our Instagram and Facebook pages, and we’re happy to share them here too! 

Our first nomination is the Lion Match Factory in Industria. Designed in 1936 by Richard Day, the monumental Lion Match Factory is an Art Deco palace of industry. The facade is delineated by a series of simplified columns, decorated with three matches on their capitals. The columns are framed by a cornice of crisp parallel lines that emphasise the building’s horizontality. The architect clearly defines three entrances - two on either end in monumental projecting wings, and the main entrance framed by elegant Art Deco waterfalls and topped with a clock and flagpoles.

Lion Match Factory, Industria (Johannesburg Heritage Foundation)

Our second nomination for Joburg’s most underrated historic buildings is House Hains in Yeoville. Almost everyone knows Dolobran in Parktown, the most whimsical and romantic of Parktown’s mansions. Its architect, Cope-Christie, designed precious few buildings in Johannesburg, but...

You may have noticed a quaint stone wall with two decrepit wooden gates on Louis Botha Avenue between Acorn Lane and Death Bend. Or perhaps the row of magnificent plane trees just behind the wall caught your attention as you navigated this most notorious of Joburg roads. If you were brought to a stop in traffic, you may have even looked beyond the wall and the trees and seen an imposing double storey property in the distance, and wondered how it came to be built here.

Louis Botha Avenue entrance and stone wall (Brett McDougall)

This large property, consisting of ten Houghton erven (or part thereof), was consolidated by Mrs FM Bagley between 1922 and 1925, with the main dwelling being built during this time on erf 906.

No details of the original owner, Mrs Bagley, have been found, but the name appears against a number of Houghton properties in the valuation rolls of the 1920s and 30s, so it is possible that Bagley was a property speculator. The property was purchased by Mrs A Block in the late 1920s. Ann Block was born Ann Hillman, and she married Isidore Jack Block in 1924. The dashingly handsome Isidore Block was born in 1893, and educated at St John’s College, Houghton...

My maternal grandmother, Antonetta Elizabeth Cosslett, would have turned 100 on the 13th of December 2017. And it is this hypothetical centenary that has motivated me to record what I know about her. I am the third youngest of a very large brood of cousins on my mother’s side of the family, and only really came to know her in her last decade or two, so perhaps there is a sense of disconnection with history that I am trying to mend too. And then, despite the fact that I spent most Christmas and Easter lunches in her company, she was the least coherent and articulate family elder, particularly when it came to her past. Her spoonerisms – “miracle aid” instead of medical aid – were the subject of family jokes, and her descriptions of where she had grown up left me with more questions than answers.

So let me start with what I knew before I started digging:

• She was born on the 13th of December 1917.
• She had married my grandfather, who came from the Cape, in the 1930s.
• They had lived in working class neighbourhoods – first at Wilhelmina Street, Troyeville, then at Highgate Street in Jeppestown, before moving to the slighter better Park Street, in Belgravia.
• They had 10 children, one of whom did not make it to term, and another, Patricia, who died as an infant.
• They were desperately poor, and despite having to fit 10 people into a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Jeppestown, took in...

Travel back in time to 1886. Gold has just been discovered on the Witwatersrand, and the koppies and veld between Pretoria and Heidelberg, home to a handful of boer families, their tenants and workers, are starting to attract the attention of the world. The dusty track connecting the Viljoen homestead, nestled below the ridge among abundant orchards, to Pretoria has been extended south and west to the city of tents which has mushroomed on the uitvalgrond between the farms Doornforntein, Langlaagte and Braamfontein.

The Viljoen farm is beautiful. Orange, fig, peach and apple trees were planted by JC Esterhuysen in the mid-19th century, and the abundance of these on the otherwise treeless veld has led to the farm being called Lemoen Plaas. The farm is also blessed with water: a fountain just below the farm house is a source of the Sand Spruit, which forms the western border of the property.

The situation of the farm house, at the foot of the ridge that needs to be climbed before reaching the diggings beyond, means that the Viljoens are frequently visited by weary travellers, including President Paul Kruger who rests here before continuing his journey into Johannesburg to mark the first anniversary of the gold fields. No doubt Viljoen sees an opportunity in this nuisance, because his home is soon converted into the Wayside Hotel. Other amenities are soon added: tea gardens, swimming baths and a collection of wild animals to amuse visitors. In 1893 air balloon ascents are provided by...

On the 15th of September UrbanJoburg posted a revised commentary on the bewareofcolour activities in the Johannesburg city centre. UrbanJoburg very succinctly summarises bewareofcolour’s aims:

“Briefly, artists (who originally remained anonymous) decided to paint various buildings pink as a way of highlighting the state of neglected buildings in the Johannesburg inner-city. Many of these buildings were heritage protected, and often evoked a level of pride from a certain sector of Joburgers. By painting the buildings pink, so much so that the buildings would be “crying, bleeding, leaking colour,” the intention, it seems, is (a) to expose the fact that the buildings are abandoned, (b) to highlight that this is particularly problematic in light of a lack of affordable housing in the inner-city, and (c) to instigate a broader debate about the role of buildings within cities.”

Herbert Prins, of the Egoli Heritage Foundation, had already responded to the first draft of UrbanJoburg’s thoughts on the matter in a comprehensive manner, and we are grateful that UrbanJoburg’s revised commentary takes his criticism into account, and is more nuanced and less explicit in its praise of bewareofcolour than their first draft.

The revised commentary does, however, contain criticisms of the ‘heritage lobby’ that I feel require a response:

1 - We don’t question, for example, why Urban Ocean (which apparently owns some of the buildings painted pink, including Shakespeare House) should be allowed to simply hold on to buildings in the hope, it seems, of eventually capitalising on a positive inner-city property market.

We most certainly...