Adventure meets architecture

Tomorrow we celebrate National Heritage Day. Grocott’s Mail Property takes a look at what Grahamstown has to offer in its heritage properties

There are very few places in South Africa that embrace their heritage as Grahamstown does its Settler homes, and nor will you find such an abundance of preserved and renovated houses and cottages.

But taking on one of these home is not without its challenges. Old houses might offer thick walls, sash windows, fireplaces and wooden floors – original features they are called – but they also threaten damp, leaking roofs, rotting floorboards and plumbing and electrics that are eye-wateringly eccentric. But we love them. In their book Grahamstown: Cottages to Villas (1974), Rex and Barbara Reynolds document our older houses street by street and detail the architecture that went into them, starting with the two-room cottages the 1820 English Settlers put up in the town and moving forward to those that were touched by prosperity - adding rooms and second floors, ornate balconies and pretty gardens.

In his forward to the book, architectural historian Ronald Lewcock of Cambridge, UK, explains that the settlers brought with them the Georgian architecture, still prevalent in the Regency Period (1811-1820), that they knew from the home country: simple and stylish. He writes:

“Besides the buildings that reflect this elegant style directly, there are from the beginning of the period those with Cape Dutch features, and from the later part, buildings showing the influence of the emerging Victorian taste, with bizarre alien touches fused on to the prevailing Georgian.”

The “bizarre alien touches” would of course be inspiration from their new surround- ings. This is what makes them unique.

Lewcock wrote that in SA there were few places out of the Grahamstown-Bathurst region that offered such a rich experience of "such a varied wealth of domestic architecture".

There is a vast amount of information to be found at the Albany Museum, the Bowker Library, under the watchful eye of Fleur Way-Jones.Curator Emeritus: Albany Museum and 1820 Settlers Association Genealogist.

Grahamstown was a military settlement with a garrison, a jail for military miscreants, stores for supplies and maintenance of horses and carts and very much an armed buffer in the Frontier Wars.

After the Battle of Grahamstown in 1819, which the British won, it was decided to settle the area with willing English people who would till the land, build houses and create a further buffer on the frontier. They would be given seed, rudimentary supplies, some cattle (the sheep came later) and the means to build a house. If they stuck it out for three years, the farms would become theirs.

But the Settlers did not know about the wars. And they were not the only ones being prudent with the truth. With the promises of land and prosperity, many claimed to have been farmers when they had not so much as had a pumpkin patch. Without the internet, the selection process was open to abuse.

Many of the people who headed out in the boats – 4 000 people in about 60 parties – to strengthen the borders against the Xhosa people – were equipped for the task and names from those original lists are to be found on the farms and settlements still here today.

But some were not. The Settlers along the Fish River border were particularly vulnerable and were forced back into the town to look for work. Others could not make a go of the farms.

By January 1821 there were 80 civilian cottages in the town. By May 1823, there were 300. And the settlement, between what is now Beaufort Street, Bathurst Street, Cross Street and Market Street, continued to grow with the little two-roomed cottages (the rest of the land was meant to be used to grow what they could and keep animals) forming the forerunner of areas such as Artificer's Square and are still there to be seen today in the Sunnyside area. Many are national monuments.

Some of the houses grew with prosperity, others remained not much more than the original dimensions and these, while they have romantic associations, are small to live in.

The government was not originally in favour of this settlement in the town, but many of those who came here were builders, bakers, hat-makers, carpenters, masons and retailers.

They went on to form the core of our town, with the government buildings still in the High Street and later the Cathedral where a simple church had been before it, and even before that, a farm building.

Grahamstown was born and with it our pride in the architecture, a willingness to respect and restore what is there and a thriving community of schools, Rhodes University, the Monument (and the National Arts Festival), scholars, artists, writers and workers – a community that can welcome all aspects of the heritage we enjoy here in Makana Municipality.