Foreshore - Late 1940s THE WAR is over; Cape Town is poised for rapid economic growth and a leap towards a promising modernity in this historic mid-1940s aerial photograph. The bare expanse of the recently reclaimed but undeveloped Foreshore also illustrates how growth-inspired development severed Cape Towns link with its defining littoral. The city gained a spanking new harbour, but the people lost touch with the sea. It would take some 40 years for that contact to be regained through the popular Waterfront project. Visible in the foreground of this picture are some elements of the old harbour that have been restored and retained in the ever-expanding Waterfront development.Among them are the Clock Tower, the Harbour Masters office, the old Union Castle building, and the sheds that have become, today, the home of Quay Four. This picture is one of a collection of probably the earliest aerial photographs of Cape Town and other places in South Africa bought at a London auction by Sean Hormann. Most were taken between the 1930s and the late 1940s. The political regression that coincided with the development of the Foreshore - the Nationalists coming to power in 1948 on the unembarrassed segregationist ticket of apartheid - is not obvious in this image. However, there are telling tokens of the losses of the decades to come: on the right, the clustered density of District Six which, within three decades, would be all but erased and, in the foreground, the pitched roof of the innocuous building that became the embarkation point for political prisoners banished to Robben Island. viewfromabove.co.za/Argus.htm
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 18:55:52 +0000
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