VOC Kruithuis

The Kruithuis is the oldest building on the Braak and the easiest to walk straight past, which is a pity, because there is nothing else like it left in the country. It was finished in 1777 to hold powder and shot for a town that was never attacked, and that anticlimax is most of its […]

Dorp Street

Dorp Street is where Stellenbosch is easiest to read. The buildings went up over roughly two centuries and were never cleared away, so a single block can carry a Cape Dutch gable, a Georgian front and a Victorian veranda in sequence. Oaks shade the length of it. Oom Samie se Winkel has traded here since […]

Martin Melck House

The building at 96 Strand Street is a two storey eighteenth century townhouse with a small room set on its roof, framed by scrolled volutes and crowned with a carved bird. Its name, Martin Melck House, leads most visitors to assume that Martin Melck lived here. He did not. Melck gave the Lutheran congregation the […]

Heritage Square

Heritage Square is easy to misread. The name suggests an open public square, and it sits directly across Shortmarket Street from one, but it is not a square at all. It is a city block, bounded by Bree, Shortmarket, Hout and Buitengracht Streets, made up of old buildings that were restored in the 1990s and […]

Strand Street Lutheran Church

The Strand Street Lutheran Church is the yellow-washed range about halfway along Strand Street, set behind a line of palms with traffic running past the door. The church itself carries a curved Cape gable and a square tower with clock faces and a slender spire, and the buildings continue on either side in one long […]

St Stephen’s Church

St Stephen’s Church stands on the Bree Street edge of Riebeeck Square, a long pale yellow building behind a low stone wall and a row of parked cars. At a glance it reads as a modest nineteenth century church: a pedimented front, pointed windows with white surrounds, steps up to the door. The giveaway is […]

Riebeeck Square

Riebeeck Square is a large open block in central Cape Town, bounded by Bree, Shortmarket, Church and Buitengracht Streets. Most of it is a surface car park: worn asphalt, faded bay markings, traffic cones and rows of parked cars, with trees along the street edges and Table Mountain filling the view. A cream classical building […]

Prestwich Memorial

The Prestwich Memorial is a low single-storey building of brick and grey stone, standing on an awkward triangular site at the corner of Somerset Road and Buitengracht Street beside St Andrew’s Square. It is easy to walk past, and the largest lettering on it belongs to the coffee roastery that occupies much of the interior, […]

Tana Baru Cemetery

Tana Baru lies on the eastern slopes of Signal Hill, where the Bo-Kaap street grid runs out and the hillside takes over. It is reached at the top of Longmarket Street, and it is a fenced and gated precinct rather than open ground. The Tana Baru Trust describes it as the first officially recognised Muslim […]

Palm Tree Mosque

Palm Tree Mosque sits on the eastern side of Long Street, a green-painted double-storey building wedged between a brick warehouse and a blue apartment block, with a single tall palm growing out of the pavement in front of it. A small green sign above the door carries its name. Nothing about it announces itself as […]