Cape Town Venues
Shopping
The shopping worth crossing town for in Cape Town is small, specific and mostly independent — an Africana bookseller on Long Street since 1957, a rare-book and antique-map dealer in Kalk Bay, a shop of South African makers in an eighteenth-century house.
This is not a mall list. Cape Town has plenty of chain retail and none of it needs a guide. What is harder to find, and worth the detour, are the specialists: the booksellers who know their subject, the shops selling work made by people you could name, and the counters that have been in the same building long enough to have become part of the street.
Hours are worth checking before you travel. Two of these are open seven days; one publishes no fixed hours at all and asks visitors to make an appointment rather than arrive on spec.