Images of historical Parktown, the genteel colonial enclave that heralded the beginning of the suburban push northwards out of the dusty, noisy town, have been found on the top of a cupboard, abandoned there for 30 years.
In 1993-94 the then Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust (now the Joburg Heritage Foundation, JHF) called for photographers to document Parktown 100 years after its founding. About 39 colour photos were submitted, the names of the photographers now lost to history, and they were exhibited at the central library in the inner city. The A3 photos are mounted on hard boards, measuring 50cm by 40cm, and were later offered to Museum Africa, which declined. So they ended up on the top of a cupboard at that grand sandstone pile on the Parktown ridge, Northwards.
“They were perfectly safe there,” says Flo Bird, Joburg’s long-time champion of heritage, and founder of the trust. But a week or two ago, Prof Kathy Munro, another heritage hero, spotted and retrieved them.
“The collection covers some fine (often familiar) heritage homes, apartment blocks, churches, a synagogue, hospitals, a children’s home, offices, Wits University buildings, colleges, and schools,” she says. “Collectively, they show old and new Parktown buildings as at the early 1990s.”
So what of Parktown in the early 1890s? The suburb owes its birth to the feisty Lady Florence Phillips, who originally lived in Doornfontein with other future Randlords (the Joburg Art Gallery was her idea too). The story goes that one day she rode her horse to the top of the ridge, looked out on the treeless landscape towards the Magaliesberg, and went home to declare that she wanted a home on that ridge. The result was the 40-room Hohenheim (German for “home on high”), the first house on the ridge, and later the home of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick. It was eventually pulled down in 1970 to make way for that concrete monstrosity, now the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital.
Parktown was created as an exclusive English country estate, with a meadow to graze cows, a cricket oval (remnants of which remain on the Wits Business School campus), schools, a church, and wide avenues for carriages. The suburb supplied its own street lighting, water and sanitary collection. The British ambience is reinforced in the street names: St Andrew’s, Queens, Jubilee, York, Oxford. And large mansions soon rose from the ridge — St Margaret’s, Glenshiel, Emoyeni, Eikenlaan, Northwards.
Several of the homes — Dolobran, North Lodge, The View, Hazeldene Hall — are part of the photographic collection, still looking as splendid in 1993 and now as they did when they were built. But they have taken on different personas. North Lodge conjures up romantic French castles, now Wits’ Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, a new multidisciplinary research institute.
The View, the home of Thomas and Annie Cullinan, of the famous Cullinan diamond, sits proudly still but without its view to Pretoria, where the diamond was found, and is now the home of the Transvaal Scottish Regimental Museum. These days it’s an event venue.
The Victorian Hazeldene Hall was built next door for Charles Jerome in 1902, a financier, stockbroker and director of companies, like most of the Randlords. He was known as the “King Coal” as he founded the Boksburg coalfields. The home was reborn in 1984 as the Herbert Baker Restaurant, relocating in 2004 to Morningside to become the White Boy Shebeen, now closed. The hall is refashioned now as Park Lane Hospital’s training centre.
Dolobran, a fairytale Art Nouveau creation, sits in eclectic splendour at the top of Oxford Road, with its original décor intact, featuring hunting trophies, rifles and spears, delicate stained-glass windows, and four pantries. It is unique in that it is still owned by the Andersson family, now occupied by the fourth generation.
If not for Bird, these buildings would have been demolished in the 1960s for the planned M6, which would have thundered through from St John’s College to Roodepoort. “It took me 20 years to kill the plan,” she says. As it is, homes were demolished and their rubble exists under mounds in the Pieter Roos Park.
The demolitions in Eton Road, Girton, Sherborne, Park Lane, and Wellington made way for a new wave of office buildings, captured in the photographs, bringing Parktown into the 1990s.
After the first wave of corporate departures from the inner city in the 1980s, a second wave in the 1990s saw them move to Rosebank and Sandton, but Parktown seems to have escaped that mass exodus, until now. A drive down Wellington Road reveals for sale and for rent boards in between office buildings.
The schools — Parktown Boys’ High School, Roedean and the Parktown Convent — have weathered the storm of demolitions and conversions. The homes that now make up the Wits’ business and governance schools on St David’s Place have been transformed into offices and conference venues, and are well cared for.
Moving to the western edge of Parktown you find perhaps the most exciting of the buildings captured in the photographs — the 1918 home and garden of architect Peter Rich, the sparkling Reckitt’s Blue and turquoise façade making a bold statement in stark contrast to the colonial beginnings of the suburb. It’s hard to put into words the effect of the house, and the presence of Africa in what Rich has created inside and out. “The dialogue between the house and garden is integral,” he says.
It is breathtaking in its artistry and textures and colours, with Ndebele murals, stone walls, generous north-facing windows to let in the “Transvaal light”, and 39 Jackson Hlungwani wood sculptures, among beaded works and pottery and more. He takes me up a winding stone staircase encased in stone conical walls to the top of the 0.3ha property.
“Everything I’ve done is influenced by the house and garden,” he says. There is a huge ancient cairn and 100-year-old apricot tree in the middle of this slice of heaven. He bought the house in the 1970s and largely demolished it to re-imagine it with influences from Ndebele art, Sir Herbert Baker, Portuguese architect Pancho Guedes (who encouraged him to buy the house) and European architect and modernist movement advocate Adolf Loos.
“A house is not a home unless it’s a village,” he says, taking inspiration from his study of Ndebele villages and his long relationship with Hlungwani, who resisted selling his art to dealers at Rich’s prompting, seeing it more as an expression of being.
“We all build our pieces of paradise, with a combination of all things.” Rich won the World Building of the Year 2009 for the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo.
He states on his website that his work “challenges the traditional design narrative, flipping the script to an era where African architecture and home-grown ideas are increasingly influencing the international stage”.
From Dolobran’s four pantries to a village in a home, Parktown endures.
• Besides the 39 photos, there are books, prints and paintings for sale on May 17 and 18 at the Holy Family College in Parktown.
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