I’m a sucker for second hand bookshops, actually I’m a sucker for bookshops, period. But if you want a real experience visit the Collectors’ Treasury in Commissioner St in Joburg’s eastern inner city.  It is located in an 8 story building – a very unprepossessing post-war structure, which is slightly further west of Arts on [...]

Park Station then and now:
 
Currently seen opposite Brickfields in Newtown and just south-west of Mandela Bridge
Johannesburg’s first railway station ,  commissioned by the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and designed by the Dutch architect Jacob Klinkhamer, was  manufactured in Rotterdam in 1895.  It was brought out to the Transvaal and was re-erected at Park Halt (as Park [...]

The Johannesburg Heritage Foundation runs weekly tours usually on Saturday afternoons. What makes them special is that they explore interesting parts of Johannesburg, often include unusual places and spaces that are off-the-tourist-route, and they are often walking tours. They also sometimes do bus tours (like the Parktown Garden Tour on Sun 17th Feb and the [...]

If one of your goals in 2013 is to take more time off and get fit while also getting into nature, then we have lots right on our doorstep in Joburg.   I was sent the Friends of Kloofendal newsletter and was amazed by the range of activities and events on offer.
Run by Joburg City [...]

Coming up on the 20th October is a tour of the Wits campus. Apart from seeing a range of architectural styles from different decades of the 20th Century, the east campus offers insight into the original planning and layout of the core early buildings  while the west campus offers interesting examples of adaptive re-use  in [...]

In 2011 the old potato sheds behind the Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg were demolished to make way for the first major retail and leisure investment in the city for a while.  Planned as a mixed-use node it is being developed by  Atterbury Property,  facilitated by the Johannesburg Property Company and the Johannesburg [...]

 
 
 
Just discovered a great website on Joburg (bit embarrassed I didn’t know of it before).    It’s  www. jhbwtc.blogspot.com and it’s the website of  the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.   Based at Wits University, their work (as their name indicates) is academic and inter-disciplinary, focusing on critical social analysis.  I found an interesting article [...]

Part of the entertainment landscape in Joburg in the mid 20th Century was the Drive-In Cinema. Sadly the last one, the Velskoen Drive -In,  will disappear in a week or so.  See http://findingjozi.co.za/reminiscing-an-ode-to-velskoen-drive-in/ I remember when I was about 10 or so my mother taking me to see what turned out to be quite a scary movie at [...]

Boekehuis has been an institution in Jozi in terms of providing a public space allowing for informed, engaged and intelligent public debate. It is a sad inditement that the holding company, the large profitable corporate Media 24, seemed to look only at the bottom of  line of profit,  rather than seeing Boekehuis and what it offered in [...]

Delta Park, 104 hectares of open park land, is just 5 blocks from Liz at Lancaster. The area now known as Delta Park was part of the  farm Klipfontein in the 19th Century. In 1902 it became a grazing area for cows as part of William Rattray’s estate.   Delta Park as we now know it, [...]