It’s the Monaco of Cape Town, a playground for the super-rich in a city infamously neglectful of its poor. Cut off, more than ever, from the city of which it is supposedly a part, it has become concerned only with itself, the sybarite at the dinner table, the narcissist you once thought you knew. It’s time to hit pause.
Three decades on, and developments continue apace at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. Will its development ever end before there’s no space left for the ships? Before we all struggle to remember what anything ever looked like in its nascent days?
Revisiting the V&A Waterfront decades after you first stood under the steel girders of what was to become its flagship mall is a strange experience. How could there be so much of everything? How do you find your way any more? Any focus has long perished; in its place, a perplexing maze of brick, steel and glass, punctuated with bobbing boats with their skippers touting for your custom, almost everything designed to enthral and inspire. But collectively its effect is to overwhelm and confuse.
Everything is expensive. The clothes are expensive, the art, the appliances, the food, the coffee, even the Coke. Nothing here speaks to the ordinary person with a monthly budget to come out on and all the pressures most of us face. It is there for the fat-wallet tourist more than for the people of the city it is meant to serve. The Waterfront is not separated from the city it serves by design or artifice; it is separated from most of us by having done too much too fast, for too long, and it has lost its charm and character somewhere along the way.
Go away from the Waterfront for five minutes and when you return there’ll be another new development, another renovation, another innovation. Something will be gone, something new will be coming soon, all manner of other things will be pending.
The V&A Waterfront cannot stand still. It fidgets and shifts, eternally fretting about its future while slowly, irrevocably consuming itself. And off it goes again in 2023, in search of yet more reinvention of the copiously reinvented. The Union Castle building precinct, where Vaughan Johnson et al plied their wares, is undergoing a massive revamp with all sorts of wonderful things promised soon. The Cape Wheel is moving, making way for a piazza to accommodate public transport. A rooftop ...