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Whittington Hotel - City Hall Hotel
Central Cape Town, Western Cape

Frederick (Fred) CHERRY: Architect 1894
MacGILLIVRAY and GRANT: Architect 1911 and c1925
Date:1800s : 1894 : 1911 : c1925
Type:Hotel
Status:Extant but altered
Street:Darling Street near Zieke (now Corporation) Street

 


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Coordinates:
Alt: 22m

Additions and alterations by Fred CHERRY (Pryce-Lewis list 3 054).

Cherry changed it from a single-storey hotel to three storeys with 21 bedrooms in 1894. Dennis Edwards & Co included it in their Cape Town Guide (1897: 109) as one of the leading hotels in Cape Town at the time.

It was renamed the City Hall Hotel in 1902. William Grant (MacGILLIVRAY & GRANT) designed a saloon bar in 1911, and an extension towards the City Hall and a new roof façade in the mid-1920s (Walker 2015: 34).

When Rennie inspected the building in 1978, it was still the City Hall Hotel. He noted: “Old central city site. Old fabric possibly survives” (1978: 222). Nothing of the late-Victorian façade of the hotel had remained by that time.

Google Street View of 2009 shows a bar and liquor store on street level, and a lounge advertised on the first floor. No hotel signage. When the building was sold in 2015, the ground floor was turned into shops.

Submitted by Lila Komnick


Books that reference Whittington Hotel - City Hall Hotel

Rennie, John for CPIA. 1978. The Buildings of Central Cape Town 1978. Volume Two : Catalogue. Cape Town: Cape Provincial Institute of Architects. pg 222 item 66.26
Walker, Michael. 2015. Old hotels of Cape Town (1890-1911), The : A history long forgotten, seldom told. St James: Published Privately. pg 33-34 + ill, 76