Marshallstown

Harking back to Johannesburg's first gold mining boom, a rare stamp battery has been revived by a specialist restoration project. The centrepiece of an open-air mining display in central Johannesburg, this massive piece of mining machinery can be seen standing tall at the corner of Hollard and Main Street.

The landmark Langlaagte Stamp Battery (Jennifer van den Bussche)

Commissioned by the City of Johannesburg, preservation work was done by Sibambene Bolt Heritage Construction, starting in June 2021, including replacing damaged timber, and treating the heavy metal. Iron columns were carefully replaced with much effort, one at a time, as these are extremely heavy.

The sheer weight and scale is all the more remarkable, when one considers that in the old days these giant contraptions were lugged overland on ox-wagons, all the way from Cape Town to the distant goldfields on the Witwatersrand.

Stamp mills like this one were used to crush gold-bearing rock in the early days of mining on the Witwatersrand, and soon there were thousands of stamps in operation, though few of these have survived.

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In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie describes some of the victories and defeats of the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust as it made its transition to becoming the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation. The article was written in 2012 and published on Davie's website in 2020. Click here to view more of her work.

Joburg turned 126 years old on 4 October. On the same day the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust became a new entity, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation.

The trust has been the champion of heritage structures in the city for the past 30 years, and Flo Bird has been the chairperson for all those years. 

A fiery fighter of the city’s heritage, she says of the trust: “It was always a fighting organisation – we were not prepared to surrender heritage without a fight.”

One of the historic buildings the trust has saved is the Sunnyside Hotel, built in 1895 as the home of American Hennen Jennings, and from 1901, the official residence of Lord Alfred Milner and subsequent officials.

Sunnyside (The Heritage Portal)

Another home in Parktown that was saved from the bulldozers was built for James Goch. He arrived in the city in 1886 and set up a photographic studio. He moved into the house with his family around 1905. The double-storey house had 12...