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Date: 1898 Type: Public Park Status: Extant   Click to view large map Coordinates:

Joubert Park is Johannesburg's oldest park, granted by the Volksraad in 1887 at the request of the Diggers' Committee, Johannesburg’s earliest local government, as a 'public park or garden to be planted with trees'. It is named after the town's first mining commissioner, General Piet J Joubert. The land was ploughed in 1891 and planted with seeds and seedlings. In 1895 some indigenous trees were added to the botanical transplants, followed by a central ornamental fountain with a rockery and water flowers. In 1898 a conservatory, bought from the Wanderers Club, was added. In 1906, Joubert Park was donated by the government to the Johannesburg Municipality 'for the purposes of or incidental to the recreation and amusement of the inhabitants.' As part of Edwin Lutyens’s design, he proposed doubling the size of Joubert Park by constructing a wide causeway to span the railway tracks and include Union Ground (later known as Jack Mincer Park and now the location of Park Central Taxi Rank). The changes would have placed the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) in the centre of a generous twenty-acre park. Lutyens’s plans envisaged Joubert Park as the rear garden, with the front park being treated as a cour d’honneur (three-sided courtyard) with formal lawns. The proposed park drew on a 'mixture of grand scale and intimate elements, related to major, minor and converging axes'. Joubert Park had neither a singular designer nor a singular design. The formal architecture of the eventual park design, set on an axis with a symmetrical arrangement, created not only a sense of order and clarity in the dusty mining town but also spaces for public sitting and promenading. In 1953, "whites only" signs were affixed to its benches. They would only be removed in 1974. Summarized by Paul v d Merwe from: A brief history of Joubert Park by Jonathan Cane (2019) et al.