Houghton

This must be a first in the Johannesburg blue plaque collection... a bus shelter has received a heritage marker. I last wrote about the condition of the bus shelter in 2014 when it had been left derelict and was in a sad state of neglect. There has been a complete turnaround with the bus shelter now restored and celebrated as a unique item of Johannesburg heritage. This is a bus stop with a difference.

The restored bus station (Eric Itzkin)

I am delighted to share the news that the City of Johannesburg has unveiled a new blue plaque for a bus shelter which is located at the corner of Tudhope Avenue and Louis Botha Avenue. The inscription reads:

Built by the Johannesburg City Engineers Department in 1934, this is a rare example of quality granite mine stone masonry and craftsmanship evident in so many of the City’s projects of that period. The bus stop served the trolley buses that ran along Louis Botha Avenue to Norwood, Orange Grove, Bellevue and Sydenham. The trolley bus system closed in 1986. The chlorination chamber below is the earliest known water purification chamber in Johannesburg.

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Johannesburg Heritage is proud to announce some new blue plaques. This week was installation week as Danie Smit (installer) and Kathy Munro (JHF blue plaque committee chair) set out on another blue plaque adventure. Each plaque is the result of a complex process of visiting the premises, deciding whether the place is worthy of a plaque, conducting and checking the research, compiling and approving the inscription and then asking for layouts, discussing those, ordering the approved layout and finally organising for it to be installed which means getting in touch with owners so we can have up to six erected in one day! Six went up on Thursday, 2nd December 2021.

Installing Blue Plaques (Kathy Munro)

Houghton and Orange Grove (2 plaques)

Our first stop was the old property, House Bleloch at the intersection of Louis Botha Avenue and Osborne Road Houghton. David Fleminger and Brett McDougall have commenced the task of clearing the undergrowth, mountains of refuse and rubbish to open up a path to the once well known beauty spot of early Johannesburg, the Orange Grove Waterfall.

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It is with regret that I inform the heritage community of Johannesburg that a special Robert Howden house has been demolished. No application for demolition was received by the Joint Plans Committee East of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and it would appear that an application for demolition was neither received nor approved by the Provincial Heritage Resources Agency of Gauteng (PHRAG).

I mourn the loss of this lovely heritage home. It happened in a flash with a new owner choosing demolition ahead of preservation. Bulldozers have flattened all. Lorry tracks form ridges on the friable red earth. At the rear of the property, the original double garage and the staff quarters still stand; probably still useful to store building material or be a building site office or house a security guard.

The Robert Howden home has been demolished (Kathy Munro)

At the front of the property on 4th Avenue there is a front boundary wall and stylish main driveway gates. But those are not heritage features. Although in keeping with the arts and crafts style of the house, the wall and gates were erected in the last decade.

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In 1920, St John’s College was still in its infancy. The school had been established in 1898 as a parish school of St Mary’s Anglican Church in downtown Johannesburg. Soon afterwards, the social upheaval caused by the Anglo-Boer South African War (1899-1902) – including the evacuation of many civilians from Johannesburg and the deportation of the school’s headmaster by the Boer authorities – had necessitated the closure of the school for some eighteen months.

After the War, enrolment figures had initially recovered quickly. However, the subsequent advent of the ‘Milner schools’ posed a mortal threat to private church schools such as St John’s. The ‘Milner schools’, heavily subsidised by the colonial government, offered better facilities and lower fees than St John’s. At the time, St John’s was located in the unassuming ‘Tin Temple’, constructed of wood and corrugated iron, in the vicinity of the present-day Noord Street taxi rank. The school had no playing fields.

Unable to compete with the better-resourced government schools in difficult economic times, St John’s College’s enrolment figures declined rapidly. By 1905, only forty-odd boys remained in the school, which was soon in substantial debt. The parish church, unable to sustain the school, handed it over to the Anglican diocese. Thus, St John’s became a diocesan school. But the general consensus was that the school was a ‘sinking ship’. Closure seemed imminent and inevitable.

As a measure of last resort, Archdeacon Michael Furse, who was the chairman of the College Council, requested the Community of the Resurrection to take charge of the school. The Community of...

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...

Over the holidays I was given a unique Christmas gift by my friend, Peter Digby who shares my enthusiasm for Johannesburg heritage items. It was a single old yellowed newspaper page, dated 9th November 1965, from The Star Newspaper. The page was saved in a cupboard of the Digby home because it carried an unusual story. The headline was: “Fine old stone in a new wall“. The article tells the story of a Mr Barney or Bernard Lobel (his name was actually Barnett Lobel) who rescued and saved the precision cut, dressed and shaped grey quartz and granite stone that was retrieved from the precinct and park when the Harrow Road (now Joe Slovo drive ) was widened and reconstructed in the late 1950s.   

Johannesburg walls and rocks

This yellowed fragile newspaper cutting set me thinking about Johannesburg walls and streets. If you look around the city, you will find examples of early stone and rock taken from the hilly ridges or from mining operations. Stones were quarried and it was all there for the taking. Since gold was embedded in a series of gold bearing reef and seams that ran for miles to the south of the city and descended at a 45% angle, extensive underground blasting was required and a great deal of quartz was excavated which could be used for building. Mine rocks were recycled into all sorts of structures from pioneering days. These rocks were all essential building material ahead of the making of bricks.

These...

The topography of Johannesburg is distinctive with the rocky mountainous ridges and the line of koppies that runs from east to west. These are the quartzite ridges of the famous Witwatersrand. The geology is unique. Viljoen and Reimold (An Introduction to South Africa’s Geology and Mining Heritage) make the point that this is one of the few localities where the evolution of the granitic crust of Southern Africa has been preserved and can be viewed. There are several places in Johannesburg where approximately 500 million years of the Earth’s history is exposed and displayed. One needs a geological guide, but what one sees is a layering of hard quartzite rock and sediments of shale above the quartzite, within the Witwatersrand super group. To the south is the further layering of conglomerates with the gold bearing reefs, such as the Main Reef, Main Reef Leader, South Reef, Promise Reef, Kimberley Reefs etc.

Some of the best spots to see geological time exposed are on either side of the rock lined quartzite roads of the cuttings and passes of Johannesburg. Here we are looking at more recent history. It is some 130 years since gold was discovered and the city of Johannesburg was founded. People settled on the ridges and hills as well as in the valleys and dales. The residential properties located on the ridges are considered to be the most desirable for their views, their elevations and their well-established trees and gardens. The air seems fresher, cleaner, clearer...

We found this very interesting historical snippet in the archives of the Egoli Heritage Foundation. The referencing is unclear but we think it may have appeared in the book Down Memory Lane by Harry Zeederberg published in 1971.

If the early expectations of the Houghton Syndicate, and subsequently that of the Houghton Estate Goldmining Company, which was formed on March 7, 1889, had been realized the picturesque Munro Drive, and the Houghton Ridge, which gives visitors one of the finest views of the Magaliesberg Mountains, would today be straggled with mine headgears and huge dumps.

Imagine Mine Dumps instead of Munro Drive

Barney Barnato, who was part owner of Houghton, sold his entire holdings, consisting of 2 100 acres, which included the area fringed by Houghton Drive and the Ridge, to the Houghton Syndicate, a group of Pietermaritzburg businessmen for R40 000. Prospecting results, however, were disappointing and the Syndicate decided to cut their losses by accepting an offer of R16 000 from a newly formed company, the Houghton Estate Goldmining Company, for the 30-year lease rights.

The new concern appears to have been more optimistic and certainly persuasive, because they apparently had no difficulty in persuading the public to invest R600 000 in the new mining venture. The prospectus subsequently issued by the company described the property as situated about one mile north of ‘the township...