Lost Johannesburg, by Arnold Benjamin

Lost Johannesburg, by Arnold Benjamin. MacMillan South Africa Publishers. Johannesburg, South Africa 1979. ISBN 0869540815 / ISBN 0-86954-081-5

Lost Johannesburg, by Arnold Benjamin. 'Because I know Johannesburg. There is no other city in the world that is so anxious to shake off the memories of its early origins,' Herman Charles Bosman once wrote.

Jacket picture, front: Unit Security House (1906-74), a small Edwardian gem amid the concrete canyons of the city's financial quarter. In this photograph, taken in 1968, it is flanked by another Johannesburg landmark that was strictly ephemeral, the bare concrete core and cranes of the half-constructed Standard Bank Centre.

Introduction

There is no record of when the first building was demolished in Johannesburg. My own half-serious guess is that it was towards the end of 1886, within a couple of months of the official proclamation of the goldfields township. It cannot have been long after that, anyway, that the first Johannesburger found his corrugated-iron shanty too small, or too outmoded, or too insignificant compared with that of Digger Jones next door, and pulled it down in order to build something bigger and/or better. Thus a restless cycle of destruction and reconstruction was set in motion which has not ceased for the last ninety years, and will no doubt persist for the next ninety. This was a city founded on the most material of bases - the lure of gold - and so its progress, more than most, has always been measured in visible, material terms. In that sense, of course, its advance has been spectacular. Look at pictures of the mining camp of 1886, a straggle of tents, wagons and lean-to shacks, and of the solidly built-up town centre of 1888. Compare the city centre of the 1950s with the way it looks today: great parts of it are scarcely recognisable; early suburbs like Braamfontein, Doornfontein and Parktown even less so. More is vanishing yearly. More still is threatened. Corrugated iron to brick, brick to stone and concrete. Single and double storeys to skyscrapers and family homes to high-rise office blocks. Johannesburg's progression of architectural ages was highly telescoped: some sites today are being built upon for the fourth and fifth times. Whatever the city has gained in these processes of renewal - and let us not decry the sheer dynamism and economic drive they represent - it has lost much at the same time. That loss has to be measured in less calculable terms. It is a loss of human scale, of historical and sociological association, of'character' and yes, even charm. Now charm is a risky word to use about a city like Johannesburg, but it can be defended. This was never a beautiful place but it did have - let us say until the post-World War II building boom - an identifiable character of its own. It was a physical character still largely derived from the boom years of the middle 1890s and the early 1900s. Very many of its large commercial buildings, for instance those along Eloff Street, belonged to that era. So did still-viable residential suburbs such as plush Parktown, built in self-conscious imitation of the English baronial life-style. Overall, downtown Johannesburg had the character of a medium-sized commercial outpost of Edwardian Europe. Its major buildings, private and public, expressed both the affluence and the eclectic architectural vigour of the age. Ostentatious, over-ornate, monuments to bad taste many of them might have been; but built mostly with craftsmanship and pride; individuality of style instead of dull international concrete. That is the way I, for one, recall much of Eloff Street in the 1950s when I first began to take notice of the face of the city. (Or rather, noticed its disappearing face, for usually it is only when the wreckers move in that most of us register what we are losing.) [...]

This is an excerpt from Lost Johannesburg, by Arnold Benjamin.

Title: Lost Johannesburg
Author: Arnold Benjamin
Publisher: MacMillan South Africa Publishers
Johannesburg, South Africa 1979
ISBN 0869540815 / ISBN 0-86954-081-5
Original hardcover and dustjacket, 21 x 30 cm, 102 pages, throughout b/w photos