Rich land, poor land
Once zoned for community facilities, a stretch of land on a floodplain in Cape Town has been the subject of a court dispute. A former neighbour recalls the place as one of some strange encounters
● My first encounter with the River Club was bizarre: a cricket match interrupted by an ambulance and a police van. A body had been found in the adjacent river.
In 1983 the old Liesbeek Park Recreation Club, now the subject of litigation, was run by the SA Railways & Harbours as a country club refuge for government workers who couldn’t afford smart alternatives such as Kelvin Grove or Western Province Cricket.
The club also hosted a dilapidated railway carriage, supposedly the very one that had carried the body of Cecil John Rhodes to his resting place in Zimbabwe.
I never saw the carriage again but was to see a lot more of the venue, which lies between two branches of the Liesbeek River close to where I bought a house in the suburb of Observatory.
A private company took a lease on the River Club in 1993 and ran a bar, a golf driving range and modest conference facilities — a good fit for its community facilities zoning. A nine-hole mashie golf course opened in 2003.
A Business Day editorial on February 4 referred to the recent development of the River Club, since halted by the courts, as opening up “a playground of the elite by turning part of a private golf course into a public park”. The jeans and T-shirt brigade that used to hump a handful of clubs over the dusty pitch and putt course would have laughed at that. Pink Pringle jerseys on that layout were rarer than the western leopard toads that stand to be wiped out by the planned 10-storey office blocks on the venue.
The River Club initially thrived as a multipurpose venue. It hosted auditions for Idols and the first five editions of the Mother City Queer Project. But it had a problem with flooding. In 2005 a company holding a function there sued for R2m because 15 cars floated away, which explains the decision to limit it to sports fields.
After the floods in KwaZuluNatal and warnings from water management experts, what are the odds on the new tower blocks having aquariums for basements?
In June 2015, Transnet sold the River Club to Liesbeek Leisure Properties for upwards of R12m, cheaper than many homes in Camps Bay or Constantia. The entity now developing the land is called the Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust. The land is on a floodplain and was zoned for community facilities.
Those community facilities were obviously not generating much cash: R30 for a bucket of
practice golf balls; double that perhaps for nine holes, beers at the bar and hamburgers on the terrace. Hardly the stuff to make anyone rich.
But if a rezoning could be organised, there was real money to be made.
The site of the River Club is part of a much bigger area of concern, bound by the Black and Liesbeek rivers and roughly covering land north of the N2 and south of the railway marshalling yards near Voortrekker Road. This has come to be known as the Two Rivers Urban Park (TRUP) and includes the Valkenberg psychiatric hospital and manor house and the SA Astronomical Observatory. However, quite how the many owners, including the University of Cape Town, plan to manage this mostly green space remains in question.
The main reason given in March by Western Cape High Court deputy judge president Patricia Goliath for halting the River Club development was inadequate consultation with the First Nations people. There is more than one group claiming to represent the first nation, one of which approves of the development.
There are claims that a famous battle was fought in the
area in 1510 when the Gorinhaiqua Khoi confronted the Portuguese. Beyond heritage, experts in urban design, birdlife, frogs and fauna have declared themselves opposed to the project.
The developers and politicians driving this latest building project are determined. When Heritage Western Cape placed a provisional protection order on the development in April 2018, the developers and politicians appealed and lost. But all they had to do was wait the provisional order out. In August 2020, the MEC in charge of environmental affairs & development planning, Anton Bredell, approved the development.
The 40 appeals against this decision and 180 objections to rezoning the River Club were rejected. Building began in 2021.
A short hop north of the River Club site, outside the TRUP, are the degraded and underused railway shunting yards of the Passenger Rail Agency of SA. Redevelopment, anyone?
Young is a former chair of the
Observatory Civic Association and author of Observatory: A Town in the Suburbs: A History of Observatory 1881-1913