Join the Muizenberg Historical Conservation Society for a walking tour, led by Brett McDougal, exploring the area’s architectural heritage on Sunday September 22.
Mr McDougall is a director of the Muizenberg Historical Conservation Society.
He previously chaired the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, where he led the restoration of Hilson Bridge and Orange Grove Waterfall. In 2021, he published RSA365, a survey of the built environment in South Africa, with Shaun Gaylard.
In 2022, he was presented with the Johannesburg Heritage Lifetime Honorary Membership Award acknowledging his contribution to the foundation’s work over the last decade.
The tour will start at the Rhodes Cottage Museum at 10am. It costs R100 each.
Mr McDougall said Muizenberg was no more than a remote outpost of farms and fishing huts before the arrival of the railway in late 1882.
The ability to travel from Cape Town and further afield to Muizenberg’s beaches quickly and comfortably changed everything, and by the second decade of the 20th century the stretch between Muizenberg and Kalk Bay was South Africa’s premier holiday destination.
The tour, he said, would start with two seminal buildings – Rust en Vrede, designed for Cecil John Rhodes, and Watersgate, designed for John Garlick, and now called Graceland. Those two buildings, he said, would come to influence the architecture of Muizenberg, in structures that were grand and modest, in profound ways.
Although the tour’s focus will be on Cape Mediterranean architecture, along the way, it will pause to admire observation posts and homes in the Cape vernacular, Victorian curiosities, Edwardian libraries and railway stations, Art Deco cinemas and hotels, and an example of the heroic age of modernism.
For more information or to book, email muizenberg.heritage@gmail.com
