De Waterkant Heritage Walk

3. Cape Town Station / Golden Acre area

Movement, transport and early water supply

Continue towards Cape Town Station and the Golden Acre. This is one of the busiest parts of the walk: trains, taxis, buses, commuters, shoppers and visitors all crossing through the same urban space. Beneath the modern commercial layers is an older story of movement and supply. The remains of Wagenaer’s Reservoir, built in 1663, can still be seen in the Golden Acre complex. The reservoir collected water for ships calling at the Cape on the sea route between Europe and Asia. This is a useful place to remember that early Cape Town was not simply a settlement beside a beautiful bay. It was a working refreshment station. Ships needed water, food, labour, repairs and shelter. The town grew around those needs.

Look for: the station, pedestrian flows, commercial bustle, and any signage or access relating to Wagenaer’s Reservoir within the Golden Acre.

4. Lower Waterkant Street and the Foreshore edge

The shoreline that moved

From the station area, head towards the lower end of Waterkant Street. As you move through the Foreshore edge, the city changes scale. The older, tighter fabric around the Castle and station gives way to wider roads, larger blocks, rail infrastructure and modern buildings. This part of Cape Town was transformed by land reclamation in the 1930s and 1940s, when the sea was pushed outward and the modern Foreshore was created. What now feels like solid city was once much closer to water, landing places and harbour activity. This stretch may not be the prettiest part of the walk, but it is one of the most revealing. It shows how dramatically Cape Town’s edge has been redrawn.

Look for: wide roads, rail lines, large modern blocks, and the distance between the old city and the present harbour.

5. Waterkant Street and Buitengracht

Street names as memory

At Waterkant Street, pause for the street name itself. Waterkant means “waterside”. The street is no longer beside the water, but the name remembers an older geography.

As you continue towards Buitengracht Street, look at the names around you. Strand means beach. Jetty and Dock point back to the working harbour. Buitengracht can be understood as the outer canal or outer ditch, recalling an old edge of the colonial town. These names can feel ordinary today, surrounded by traffic and buildings, but they are clues to an older Cape Town. The history is not only in monuments or museums. Sometimes it is sitting quietly on a street sign. As you move up towards De Waterkant, other names begin to tell a different layer of the story. Chiappini, Jarvis, Dixon, Hudson and Napier point towards the nineteenth-century expansion of Cape Town beyond Buitengracht, when land near Somerset Road and the old harbour edge was subdivided, sold and developed. Rose, Chiappini, Dixon and Hudson Streets already appear on early nineteenth-century maps of this part of the city.

Look for: Waterkant Street, Buitengracht Street, Strand Street nearby, and the way street names preserve older layers of geography and development.

6. Prestwich Memorial

Burial grounds and difficult urban memory

A short walk from Buitengracht brings you to the Prestwich Memorial, a quieter and more reflective stop on the route. In 2003, human remains were uncovered during development in this part of the city. The memorial and ossuary that followed recall the burial grounds of enslaved people, the poor and others who were buried beyond the formal spaces of colonial Cape Town. City heritage material describes this area around Prestwich Street, Somerset Road and Buitengracht as part of a wider landscape of formal and informal burial grounds on the edge of the old town. The old shoreline was a place of ships, trade and movement. It was also a place of inequality, forced labour and lives left out of official memory. There is usually a natural pause here. If the café is open, this is a good place to sit for a few minutes before continuing up towards Strand Street and the old quarry edge. Opening hours should be checked before planning the walk around refreshments.

Look for: the memorial space, the garden, the surrounding development, and the contrast between contemporary city life and the histories beneath it.

7. Strand Street and the Old Quarry

Stone, labour and the making of the city

From the Prestwich Memorial, continue up towards Strand Street. The name matters. Strand means beach, and although the sea is now far away, the name recalls the older shoreline that once lay much closer to the city. Make your way towards the Strand Street Quarry, set between Bo-Kaap and De Waterkant. This part of the walk opens onto the material history of Cape Town: stone, labour, walls, plaster, lime and building. City heritage material records that stone from the Strand Street quarries was used in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city. Shell from the old Table Bay shoreline also provided lime for mortar, plaster and whitewash. The houses, walls and streets of old Cape Town were not only designed. They were quarried, carried, cut, mixed, built, repaired and lived with.

Look for: the quarry edge, stonework, the relationship between Bo-Kaap and De Waterkant, and the change in level as you move towards the slopes.

8. Vos Street entrance into De Waterkant

Small signs of old street fabric

Enter De Waterkant through Vos Street where the stone street sign, steps and changing levels give a strong sense of the older street fabric. Also notice the Nurul Mogammadiah Mosque on Vos Street, established in 1899. Its presence is an important reminder that De Waterkant’s history is closely connected to Bo-Kaap and Cape Muslim life, not only to restored houses and harbour views. From here, follow the steps down towards Waterkant Street. The movement down the steps gives a physical sense of De Waterkant’s position on the slope. You are no longer moving through the broad infrastructural city of the Foreshore; you are entering a finer-grained neighbourhood of steps, walls, lanes, façades and corners. Archival research into the Hudson, Dixon and Waterkant Street block notes stone wall foundations at the Waterkant Street end of Vos Lane, with cobbled surfacing and a central gutter still visible in places.

Look for: the stone street sign, steps, walls, cobbles, slope, and the smaller scale of the surrounding buildings.

9. Café Manhattan / Waterkant and Dixon Streets

From older hotel corner to contemporary social life

At the foot of the steps, pause near Café Manhattan, on the corner of Waterkant and Dixon Streets. Today it is one of De Waterkant’s best-known social landmarks, closely associated with the neighbourhood’s more recent LGBTQ+ identity and café culture. The site also has an older social history. Archival research records that 74 Waterkant Street was formerly the Dublin Castle Bar / Hotel from around 1900 until Ohlssons sold it in 1968. This corner allows several histories to sit together: old hotel and bar life, working-city sociability, later reinvention, and the contemporary identity of De Waterkant as one of Cape Town’s most visibly LGBTQ+-friendly neighbourhoods.

Look for: the corner position, the relationship between Waterkant and Dixon Streets, the social life of the street, and the contrast between old fabric and current use.

10. Jarvis Street entrance to Cape Quarter

Restoration, reinvention and visitor-facing De Waterkant

Continue towards the Jarvis Street entrance to Cape Quarter. This is a good place to notice how De Waterkant has been restored, adapted and reimagined over recent decades.

Cape Quarter is not old De Waterkant in a simple sense. It represents a later phase of commercial redevelopment and visitor-facing urban life. Restored buildings, restaurants, shops and public courtyards have helped make the area attractive and recognisable. They have also changed the social and economic character of the neighbourhood.

De Waterkant is beautiful, but its heritage is not only picturesque. Behind the old houses, steep streets and harbour views are deeper stories of work, community, displacement, exclusion, resilience and reinvention.

Look for: restored façades, shopfronts, courtyards, changing street scale, and the way older urban fabric has been adapted for contemporary use.

11. Bayview Terrace / Loader Street

The neighbourhood above the bay

From the Cape Quarter area, continue into the tighter residential streets around Loader Street and Bayview Terrace. This is one of the most atmospheric parts of the walk: terraces, steps, rooflines, cobbles and views towards the harbour.

The important thing here is geography. De Waterkant sits on the lower slopes below Signal Hill, looking out over Table Bay and the working harbour below. Local traditions sometimes associate parts of Loader Street and Bayview Terrace with maritime life and ship captains, but those stories should be handled carefully unless supported by firm archival records. The safer and stronger point is that the neighbourhood’s outlook over the bay shaped how it was seen, used and remembered.

The City’s Bo-Kaap heritage material also notes that Bo-Kaap and Loader Street / De Waterkant once formed one community, before later road changes and apartheid-era racial zoning divided them more sharply.

Look for: views towards the harbour, the slope, narrow streets, terraces, old façades, and the closeness of De Waterkant to Bo-Kaap.

12. Dock Road / Waterfront edge

From working harbour to leisure waterfront

From De Waterkant, drop back down towards Dock Road and the Waterfront edge. The route now returns to the harbour world.

The Waterfront is now one of Cape Town’s major leisure and tourism precincts, but its origins are industrial and maritime. Docks, warehouses, rail connections, cargo, fishing, shipping, repairs and labour all shaped this area before restaurants, hotels, shops and promenades arrived.

Dock Road is a good place to notice that the harbour was once a workplace before it became a destination.

Look for: dock edges, harbour buildings, industrial forms, road alignments, and traces of working-port infrastructure.

13. Silo District / Zeitz MOCAA

Old industrial infrastructure reused

Continue into the Silo District, where the old grain silo complex has been transformed into Zeitz MOCAA and surrounding public space.

The historic Grain Silo was built in 1923 on the old shoreline and later adapted into a major cultural building. The scale and form of the structure still speak of industrial port Cape Town: storage, shipping, grain, concrete, height and machinery. Its current use tells a newer story of art, reuse, tourism and public culture.

This is one of the clearest examples on the walk of old harbour infrastructure being given a new public life.

Look for: the height and mass of the silo, the industrial geometry, the reused fabric, and the contrast between old port function and contemporary cultural use.

14. Chavonnes Battery / Clock Tower area

Original shoreline and harbour defences

End near the Chavonnes Battery and Clock Tower area. Chavonnes Battery was built between 1714 and 1725 as part of Cape Town’s coastal defences, directly on the original shoreline. The Original Shoreline project notes that it is one of the places where the old shoreline can still be encountered most directly.

This is a fitting place to finish. The walk began at the Castle, once close to the water. It crossed land created by reclamation, passed through burial memory and street-name clues, climbed into De Waterkant, and returned to the harbour edge.

Here, the shoreline is no longer only an idea. It is part of the ground beneath the Waterfront.

Look for: the Battery, the Clock Tower precinct, old harbour defences, and the relationship between the historic shoreline and the modern Waterfront.