THE OLD BUILDINGS OF THE CAPE

This edition constitutes a revision of The Old Houses of the Cape (1965) and The Old Buildings of the Cape (1980) retaining historical notes by Mary Alexander Cook co-author of the above two publications.

596 pages, numerous maps, plans and illustrations, brown cloth, a very good copy in the dust jacket.

Editor’s note: At last, by public demand, comes A Guide to the Old Buildings of the Cape which has now been fully revised, expanded and updated since its perennially popular and respected predecessors, The Old Houses of the Cape (1965) and The Old Buildings of the Cape (1980), went out of print some time ago. The original versions were the result of many years of close co-operation between the author and the late Mary Alexander Cook – two experienced museum curators who took on the daunting task, over several decades, of becoming familiar with every village and farmstead in the Cape and describing their architecture and history. This edition, itself the product of years of research, required Hans Fransen to revisit the places he inspected a quarter of a century ago – a sojourn covering 25 000 km by car and a further 5 000 km by bicycle, over an area the size of the United Kingdom. A Guide to the Old Buildings of the Cape contains over 5 000 buildings, sumptuously illustrated with some 700 photographs by Arthur Elliot, André Pretorius and the author himself, as well as some 200 house, site and town plans. This edition can therefore now lay claim to being a near-complete record of all architecture of a century and older in an area stretching as far north as Calvinia and as far east as Colesberg and Uitenhage. Pride of place is taken by the grand ‘Cape Dutch’ gabled homesteads of the Boland, but equally well represented are the modest homesteads of areas like the Sandveld and the Hantam, the flat-roofed houses of the Little and Great Karoo, and the High Victorian houses of Cape Town’s suburbs and Oudtshoorn. More than 220 churches, as well as a multitude of town halls, prisons, drosdye and schools are described. The streets in towns like Stellenbosch, McGregor and Prince Albert are recorded building by building, as are the unique mission villages such as Genadendal and Wupperthal. Lavishly illustrated and generously laid out, A Guide to the Old Buildings of the Cape is both the ultimate reference work in its field and a sumptuous coffee table book for admirers of the remarkable architecture of this region.