Rentals Cape Town

The steep, narrow and occasionally cobbled streets lined with immaculate semi-detached cottages and fronted with close-up harbour views make up a tiny affluent village. Interspersed with eye-catching places of commerce and eating and fringed with nightlife establishments that a-happen, De Waterkant is a dandy of a place.

Bars, some clubs and restaurants, give way to pockets of retail stores as you travel west from the City and Somerset Road. This is where you’ll find the Pink Block, the morphing and meandering gay clubturf of Green Point.

South-ish from here and a block up the foot of Signal Hill is De Waterkant, Dutch for the Water’s Edge, which this area must once have been before the sea was pushed back beyond the harbour walls.

De Waterkant is a zone hugging the lower reaches of Signal Hill, the original buildings of terrraced cottages housed craftsmen and freed slaves.  Some of the roads are still paved with stone and the compact houses are old and solid hybrids of Dutch, Malay and British colonial styles.

- Old Cape and New City hybrid - 

Over the last few years this quaint historic village environment has been the focus of a lot of redevelopment and the end result is an interesting hybrid of the Old Cape and new City.

Good restaurants, super-cool coffee shops and bars, decor and clothing shops and penthouse photographic studios are all to be found within this city-edge village.

- A few good things about De Waterkant -

Restaurants (food is always high on my list)

Andiamo: Deli, pastas where rich flavours and ingredients like pancetta and meatballs are etched in my memory. To be enjoyed under a broad awning in the fountain centred piazza in the Cape Quarter.

Dutch: lunch time and coffee shop: piping hot apple crumble and custard: what could be a more complete meal?

Prestwich Memorial/St Andrews Square on the corner of Buitengracht St and Somerset Road:

Completed in April of 2008 this memorial houses the remains of about 2500 dead that were exhumed during the building of a development on Prestwich St in Green Point as well as other remains unearthed during construction of the Cape Town Waterfront.

These areas were utilised as burial grounds for “slaves and heathens”. So in providing a final home for those that perished so far from the freedom of their own, Prestwich Memorial provides a peaceful green space between the City and Green Point whilst reminding us of the futility of cruelty and oppression.