Grahamstown is a wonderland of contradictions with bold Victorian buildings contrasting with new apartments, quiet streets without traffic lights and the heart of the city – Church Square – in the middle.
These elements come together to whisk us back to the 1800s when Grahamstown was formed during the Frontier Wars.
Grahamstown is a wonderland of contradictions with bold Victorian buildings contrasting with new apartments, quiet streets without traffic lights and the heart of the city – Church Square – in the middle.
These elements come together to whisk us back to the 1800s when Grahamstown was formed during the Frontier Wars.
If you haven’t lived in a cottage built in the 1820s, it is a little strange when you walk through the front door of No 6 Cross Street and you are immediately greeted by two bedrooms and a staircase, with no sight of a lounge or kitchen.
Follow the passage past the small staircase and you will come to the lounge and the kitchen, completely separate from the bedrooms.
"Cross Street was the first major development of suburbs in Grahamstown," says Irene Walker, a potter who lives in a settler cottage in Cross Street.
Rare in SA
The settler cottages in Cross Street have been declared national monuments.
The area used to known as Settlers Hill in those days, and was one big plot that was subdivided into 128 erwen clustered around Artificers Square, at the intersection of Cross and Bartholomew Street.
Walker says the corners of the square were cut off in order to erect stone posts where ox-wagons could be tethered to while merchants offloaded fresh produce.
Five or six cottages, built with local materials such as hand-hewn stone and timber, were then clustered around a common area in the middle but now used for parking.
Creating a neighbourly feeling that is rarely felt in South Africa’s modern single stand houses that are guarded by layers of high walls, electric fencing and armed guards.
Hilary Allen, another settler cottage resident, says she can easily tell where rooms were built on from the difference in the thickness of the walls.
Her bedroom and lounge walls are about 60cm thick, almost three times the size of modern walls.
The bathroom and kitchen in Allen’s house were added to the cottage many decades after it was built. This is the reason why the bathrooms in these cottages are always right next to the kitchen.
