Johannesburg CBD

News broke recently that work on Africa’s tallest building has commenced (click here for details). Assuming it will be completed as designed, the Pinnacle in Nairobi Kenya will be 300m tall eclipsing the Carlton Centre by quite a margin. The fact that the Carlton has managed to hold the record of Africa’s tallest building for over four decades is remarkable. It got me thinking about the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s that led to an explosion of towers across Johannesburg. In the short article below, I will highlight a combination of factors that contributed to the surge in height that transformed the Johannesburg skyline into the one we know today.

Looking up Fox Street towards the Carlton Centre (The Heritage Portal)

Arguably the most important factor was the stellar performance of the South African economy during the 1960s and early 1970s. Various sources state that the country achieved growth rates exceeding 7% for a prolonged period. The stock exchange boomed, new companies were formed and an overall mood of confidence and swagger developed. Johannesburg was awash with money and, with the property sector booming, much of it found a home in ambitious CBD projects. A fellow...

Most commentaries on Johannesburg of the decade of the thirties takes 1936 and the city's fiftieth birthday as the year for reflection and anticipation. See, for example, the Star Newspaper's popular history, Like it Was. Johannesburg A Sunshine City Built on Gold (1931) is an unusual publication that takes us back to the start of the decade to discover Johannesburg.

Book Cover

What was Johannesburg like in 1931? One source of information is this small 56 page booklet issued in that year by the Johannesburg Publicity Association and the SA Railways and Harbours (a national state department). It was meant to promote tourism to Johannesburg specifically and South Africa in general in an upmarket authoritative way to the elegant visitor or potential immigrant. The new Johannesburg Station (Leith and Moerdyk) was being built, the foundation stone was laid in 1928, but it did not open until 1932, when arriving train passengers saw the city for the first time as they came up the marble steps and gasped when they viewed fashionable people going shopping in Eloff Street. This is a small promotional book that might have fitted into your leather valise to be read on a sea voyage out to South Africa by mail ship. 

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The news that the Ornico Group has moved its headquarters from a prime Sandton address to the Joburg CBD is making waves in heritage and property circles. Over the past year, the company has been refurbishing the historic Natal Bank Building and in recent weeks over 100 employees have moved in. This is a major psychological boost for the ongoing revival of the historic heart of Johannesburg.

The Natal Bank Building from above (source unknown). The building is located opposite City Hall and across from Beyers Naude Square.

The Natal Bank Building was planned in the late 1890s but was only completed in 1903 due to the destabilisation caused by the South African War. For almost six decades it was used as a bank building before finding a variety of new uses. According to a survey commissioned by the City of Johannesburg, it was used by a theatrical group for a couple of years in the sixties before becoming home to the Intelligence Department and Foreign Branch. One can only imagine the secretive network that was controlled from the building.

The Main...

As many readers may know, Somerset House in downtown Johannesburg is being restored by OPH under the guidance of MayatHart Heritage Consultants. The building was built in 1906 for the United Building Society and included a banking hall and a safe deposit section. In addition to it being one of the oldest surviving bank buildings in the city (the Natal Bank Building is older), Somerset House is one of the few remaining glass roof galleried buildings in South Africa.

Inside Somerset House in 2012 (The Heritage Portal)

In 1972, the arcade which stretched from Fox Street to what is now Gandhi Square was closed and blocked off by a kitchen. It is wonderful to report that 45 years later this hidden arcade and heritage treasure has re-emerged. In the months ahead it should be opened up to be marvelled at by enthusiasts from across the country.

Longitudinal section of Somerset House showing the arcade and gallery (Doug Hindson)

The photographs below reveal how the building looked before restoration and now during restoration...

The Joburg skyline (or at least hints of it) can be viewed from hundreds of places around the city. There are some spots that provide such an exceptional view and experience that they must be shared. City enthusiasts will be aware of these and many more not mentioned. Please add your favourite spots in the comments section below.

The Hill above the Dutch Reformed Church, Cottesloe

The suburb of Cottesloe is located to the west of the City between parts of the UJ and Wits campuses. On a hill above Annet Road (accessed via Hull Street - click here for a google map) lies the landmark Dutch Reformed Church. If you make your way to the top of the hill you will see a magnificent view of the church with the city skyline in the background. The site is a favourite for photographic groups and some epic sunrises have been captured. In addition to the views of the city, photographers can get great aerial shots of the famous Gas Works.
 

The Cottesloe Church with the Joburg skyline behind (The Heritage Portal)

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While browsing through the book Seventy Golden Years (published by the Johannesburg City Council in 1956 to commemorate the city's 70th birthday), I came across a wonderful advert for Stewarts and Lloyds of South Africa. The company proudly announced that the hitching posts it supplied to the fashionable Athenaeum Club in the early 1900s were still in place over fifty years later. This was despite the Athenaeum being demolished and the reality that horses were no longer the major means of transport.

Stewarts and LLoyds Advert (Seventy Golden Years)

The advert piqued my interest and I wondered if the hitching posts were still there 61 years after the advert and 114 years after being erected. Surely six decades was enough time for a car accident to take them out, for a contractor to mistakenly remove them or for a vandal to steal them?

My first thought was to jump in my car and head out to the corner of Wolmarans and Klein Streets to search for evidence but the thought of getting caught in Joburg’s afternoon rush hour traffic during a thunderstorm quickly squashed that idea. While not as satisfying as a real-world hunt, I opened my browser to check if google maps could assist. I zoomed in via the 3D view and then transitioned to street view. A Mega Bus blocked the view but after some manoeuvring the...

Charles Thrupp arrived in South Africa from the United Kingdom in 1882 and made his way to King Williams Town to take up a job with a local wholesaler. As the gold fields of the Rand began to boom, the firm called on Thrupp to open and manage a store in Johannesburg. After a few years of solid trade, the branch hit hard times and had to close its doors in 1892. For most employees this would have meant looking for another job but Thrupp saw Johannesburg's potential and acquired the grocery side of the ailing business. He opened his first store on the corner of President and Eloff Streets later that year.

Thrupps Store on the corner of President and Eloff Streets (Seventy Golden Years)

Thrupp was forced to leave Johannesburg when the Anglo-Boer War (South African War) broke out in 1899. He returned when hostilities ended in 1902 and re-established the business at a prime Pritchard Street address. The site was only one erf down from the prized corner of Eloff and Pritchard Streets which went on to become the peak land value intersection in South Africa for over seventy years.

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Johannesburg’s Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King is an impressive landmark located on the corner of Sarotoga Avenue and End Street in Berea. It was built in the late 1950s when Johannesburg was one of the fastest growing cities in the world and opened in impressive style in 1960. Below are a few edited passages (from an article that appeared in the 1961 edition of South African Panorama) that provide a wonderful description of the architecture and craftsmanship that produced the stirring structure. 

A Great city deserves great cathedrals – this was one of the themes woven into the sixty-five years of planning which culminated in the solemn opening in Johannesburg of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King.

Set in the heart of teeming streets and the daily rush of commercial life, this cathedral was built at a cost of £250,000. It was designed by a Northern Ireland architect [Brian Gregory]. He kept the traditional form – the Latin cross – but merged the age-old majesty of cathedrals of Europe with the energetic architecture of the time.

Cathedral of Christ the King (Google Maps)

The building is a mellow rose-brown in colour. It is finished in rough concrete which gives the impression of hewn rock. From the main entrance in Saratoga Avenue the cathedral...

The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 started a gold rush that surpassed the Californian (1849), Victorian (1851) and Barberton (1885) rushes and the initial boom created the city of Johannesburg, which was literally and figuratively built on gold. The initial boom lasted for three years as the mining companies followed the sloping reef into the earth’s crust and then in 1889 the bust happened, as the gold appeared to suddenly run out which in turn caused a pall of pessimism to hang over the diggings. Read on and you will discover what happened next.

Boom times outside Johannesburg's First Stock Exchange (The Johannesburg Saga)

In early 1886 an itinerant gold prospector and stone mason, by the name of George Harrison, was passing through an area of the Old Transvaal, between the Vaal River and Pretoria known as the Witwatersrand (Ridge of White Waters), then a windswept wilderness without a tree to be seen. He was on his way to the Barberton goldfields when he stopped on route to ask for casual work from the Struben brothers who were prospecting for gold (in what is now Strubens’ Valley). They could not oblige him but instead sent him over to see Widow Oosthuizen, who needed walls built for a house, on a section of...

This article originally appeared in the do.co.mo.mo journal. Thank you to the authors for giving us permission to republish. Click here to view the article as it appeared in do.co.mo.mo journal 48 2013/1.

Aiton Court, in Johannesburg, is a case study in how heritage and economics clash in economically constrained cities. This iconic and formally innovative Modern apartment block from 1937 is located in an area where the income levels of tenants are now very low. Although the building is protected by legislation, the viability of its restoration is being further tested by a rent boycott. The article covers the building’s history, and questions how to approach its conservation differently, given the strong demand for housing at a cost level that would be excluded by purely market–led gentrification. We propose that locating conservation strategies in relation to the building’s history and to other subsidies aimed at the public good may provide other routes to preserving Aiton Court.

Aiton Court’s History

Aiton Court is an iconic and early Modern apartment building in Johannesburg’s dense suburb of Hillbrow [Main image / figure 1]. Designed by young South African architects Angus Stewart and Bernard Cooke in the mid–1930s, it reflects their exposure to the formal language of the CIAM architects through Cooke’s lecturer Rex Martienssen, the leader of what Le Corbusier termed the Groupe Transvaal (Le Corbusier, 1935; Herbert, 1975). The design of minimal apartments also shows the influence of their fellow student and political mentor Kurt Jonas who had studied housing rights in Berlin...