Click to view mapCoordinates: 33°54'54.41" S 18°25'32.21" E | | The Cape Town’s Foreshore and its related Duncan Docks / Harbour and Sturrock Graving Dock projects commenced in 1935, including, what was possibly the most ambitious land reclamation undertaken in any city in the world at that time, the foreshore reclamation scheme. The harbour scheme was envisaged to better protect and provide larger moorings for the ever-increasing sized vessels that visited there. In creating the harbour there was opportunity for extending the available land to build the infrastructure required for the developing industry and commerce of Cape Town. At the time of its completion (1945), the Foreshore added just under some 200ha of land to Cape Town City, artificially created in Table Bay. Today the actual evidence of this civil engineering achievement is underfoot or submerged beneath the ocean, hence aesthetically unremarkable, but the ever-extending built fabric and busy maritime activity is much in evidence.
Over the preceding century there had been various extensions made to the Cape shoreline and schemes put forward for the enlargement of Table Bay Harbour. But by the mid 1930s there was the requisite political will to promote and finance the project. On 15 May 1935 the then Prime Minister, General JBM Hertzog, officially inaugurated the dredging operations. Within two years it was decided to go ahead with a comprehensive scheme involving the construction of a deep-water quay from the existing south arm of the Victoria Basin right across the City front to Woodstock Beach.
The contract for the dredging and land reclamation, signed on 9 December 1937, was awarded to the Dutch firm, Hollandsche Aannemings Maatschappij (HAM). In charge of the operations was the Delft trained civil engineer Constantijn van Kretschmar van Veen (son of the former director of the NZASM, Jacob Adriaan VAN KRETSCHMAR VAN VEEN), who, prior to this, had been engaged in large harbour constructions in the Dutch East Indies (Surabaya) and at Walvis Bay (SWA, now Namibia) before settling in Cape Town from 1938 until 1946, although he had visited in 1937 to acquaint himself with the prospects of the harbour project.
War loomed in Europe, and so it was with some relief that the Dutch firm, L Smit & Co, towed out a flotilla of approximately 35 Dutch vessels, which included a rock breaker, specialised dredgers, tugs, as well as cranes from the Netherlands, to Cape Town in South Africa. These were employed in the difficult task of damming the open sea, dredging the basin, and reclaiming the foreshore. In HAM’s employ were 60 Dutch workers and about six times as many South Africans–black, white and ‘coloured’ (as they were then racially classified) –approximately in equal numbers.
From time to time the dredging was hindered, or equipment damaged, by submerged shipwrecks or metal fragments, such as cannons and cannon balls, all lying on the ocean floor as jetsam from the wreckage wrought by the disastrous gales for which the Cape of Storms was named, as well as other historic maritime disasters. These needed to be found and salvaged before construction could progress.
The new basin, measuring 600 by 1800m, was merged with its forebear through the removal of the old breakwater. It was named Duncan Dock for the then Governor General. The outbreak of WW2 added a sense of urgency to the endeavour, and in that time the new basin was put into partial use. The date for contractual completion was extended to 31 July 1945, not only for logistical but also for strategic reasons. During these war years the company also built the Murray’s Bay Harbour on Robben Island, a strategic endeavour for the radar station located there, at that time a top-secret military innovation.
Landward of the new basin, an area of 194ha was reclaimed for industrial and commercial development. The material for this massive landfill operation comprised, for the main part, sand, mud, and broken rock dredged from the newly excavated basin and pumped to the shore. In addition, the scheme entailed the depositing of clean and selected building rubble from around Cape Town, as well as municipal waste. The foreshore area of Cape Town was, however, still submerged until the 1940s, its laying dry for purposes of construction following in stages thereafter.
While the addition of a vast tract of land and a new world-class harbour offered opportunity, there was at the time of its commissioning no clarity nor consensus as to an over-arching vision for incorporating the newly created dockland precinct into the cityscape of Cape Town. As most arrivals to the country were then still by sea and, in particular, through Cape Town as the port of entry to South Africa, a grand Gateway to Africa was envisaged, and foundations even provided, but the project was never completed.
The complexities of government and municipal liaison created their own logistical confusions in the planning for the realisation of such a vast project. But they all reached agreement in the national effort to celebrate the tercentenary of the landing of Jan van Riebeeck as the Van Riebeeck (Tercentenary) Festival of 1952 (today seen as symbolically legitimising the then white colonial hegemony). The first facilities to be built were the SA Railways and Harbours warehouses which initially served as the Festival exhibition venue. After the Festival they were turned to their intended purpose. The first buildings to be erected thereafter were the Culemborg Railways Complex, named after the Dutch town of Van Riebeeck’s birth, of which a recreated market street had formed part of the Festival exhibit.
Today, the Foreshore houses amongst other notable civic and civil facilities, the Cape Town Civic Centre, the Artscape Theatre Centre, the Cape Town International Convention Centre and a range of hotels and office buildings. The upgrading of the Waterfront and Foreshore into a vast industrial, commercial, residential and shipping frontage is still being developed. It has dramatically changed the character of the City harbour precinct, obliterated many historical landmarks and features, and transformed the relationship that the early Dutch colony of the Kaap de Goede Hoop–with its Casteel and grachte–once had with the sea, yet it has created the character of the City of Cape Town as we know it today.
(notes extracted from Fisher 2021:199, 202-204, in turn based on various sources including pertinent entries in SESA).
Books that reference Table Bay Foreshore Reclamation Cape Town Foreshore Joint Technical Committee. 1948. The Cape Town foreshore plan. Cape Town: Government Printer of the Union of South Africa. pg All | Clarke, Nicholas J, Fisher, Roger C & Kuipers, Marieke C . 2021. Common Ground : Dutch-South African Architectural Exchanges 1902-1961. The Netherlands: LM Publishers. pg 198-205 | Methven, Cathcart W. 1902. Table Bay, proposed reclamation of foreshore at. Cape Town: Cape Times. pg All |
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