Heritage buildings to homes
1906: LOFTS NAMED AFTER REV SONTONGA WHO PENNED NKOSI SIKELEL’ IAFRIKA
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s on the edge of city and design.
I’ve long considered this one of Joburg’s most intriguing intersections. It’s where Enoch Sontonga meets Solomon Road and continues on into Fietas or Vrededorp as Eighth Street. As far as can be seen there are these reddish buildings on one corner, though each corner is extremely different and, just here, it always feels as though I am leaving the notcity for the city.
We’re in the not inconsiderable grounds of the old Transvaal Post Office behind the red brick buildings with its own railway siding for dropping off or heaving on mail. It was built in 1906, just nine years after Reverend Sontonga penned Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika at Nancefield not far away.
The Sontonga Lofts, with their sculpture of his head in a top hat on the corner, is Joburg’s biggest industrial conversion into residences, turning three heritage buildings into 204 very cleverly designed apartments with a park running alongside. The 1904 building is now the White House and the 1960s industrial buildings with stepped roofs, beautiful windows and soaring scale are Block House and Bridge House.
Inner living spaces differ in size and features. I love the fairly steep ladder stairs in some, the variation in platform use, the soaring height, the way the light and windows are used, the pressed ceilings and old floors in the older ones, the metal-and-brick offset in the 60s ones. My love of bunks has me endlessly climbing up to view the apartments from their heights.
It’s not solely the designs of completed places, most already sold, that enchant me, but the unbegun spaces. In Bridge House I look at the floor as though in the movie Dogville, mentally opening doors here and there in the magnificent nine apartments-to-be. Outside, where century-old bluegums still grow, once for mining purposes, are the early stages of a eucalyptus-scented park.
We argue about where we are. People have referred to ‘here’ as Milpark or even Mill Park. Three of us reckon we’re in the interestingly named Braamfontein Werf and wonder how many people know where that is. Rob Rich says: “It’s not far from 44 Stanley – people get that.” Fietas is literally across the road. The Joburg map will finally decide we’re just-just in Braamfontein. This is the edge.
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