Famous Landmarks in Johannesburg
Its Edwardian civic core rose within decades of an 1886 gold rush across open farmland.
Johannesburg's oldest surviving landmarks cluster in and around its original mining-era core, raised within a few decades of the 1886 gold strike that turned open farmland into a boomtown. City Hall, the Rand Club and the Rissik Street Post Office are all dressed in the solid, formal manner of the Edwardian period, in place of the tents and shacks that had stood a generation earlier. They were built for administration, postal service and the city's mining elite respectively, at a moment when the population had already passed 100,000 within a decade of the city's founding. Later apartheid-era planning pushed growth outward into separate townships, leaving this compact historic centre comparatively undisturbed, though not undamaged: fire and disuse have since claimed parts of it.
Johannesburg City Hall
1914
Recognisable as an Edwardian civic hall whose formal facade and front steps have witnessed protest gatherings and a 1988 bomb blast, and which today houses a provincial legislature rather than a city council chamber.
Johannesburg City Hall is an Edwardian civic building completed in 1914, its plans drawn in 1910 and construction carried out by the Hawkey and McKinley firm over the following three years. Built as the seat of municipal government, it later passed to a provincial legislature, which still occupies it. Its steps have served as a stage for public life beyond council business, including protest meetings and a bomb blast in 1988, making the building as much a record of the city's political history as of its architecture.
- A bomb blast struck its steps in 1988, decades after it opened as a seat of municipal government.
- Though built as a city hall, it is today occupied by a provincial legislature rather than any municipal body.
Photo: Sdnxumalo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Rissik Street Post Office
1897 · Sytze Wierda
Identifiable by its unusual height for a building of its age — 102 metres, once the tallest in the city — and, since a 2009 fire gutted it, by the visible signs of long-term disrepair and the restoration under way since 2016.
Designed by Sytze Wierda, architect to President Paul Kruger, the Rissik Street Post Office opened in 1897 and briefly stood as the tallest building in Johannesburg at 102 metres. It served as a working post office for almost a century before the Post Office vacated it in 1996. Declared a national monument in 1978, the building was gutted by fire in 2009 and left derelict for years; a reconstruction estimated at R147 million began in 2016 to restore it.
- At 102 metres, it was briefly the tallest building in Johannesburg.
- It sat gutted and empty for years after a 2009 fire before a roughly R147 million restoration began in 2016.
Photo: Nick-D (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rand Club Building
1904 · Leck & Emley
Recognisable less by outward ornament than by its unbroken function since 1904 as a private members' club — the third clubhouse built for a society founded in 1887 — set apart from public civic buildings nearby by its continued private use.
The Rand Club is a private members' club founded in October 1887, only months after Johannesburg itself. Its present clubhouse, the third built for the club, was designed by Leck & Emley in 1902 and completed in 1904 on a site Cecil Rhodes helped select. For more than a century membership was restricted; only in 2016 did the club change its rules to admit members regardless of race or gender, a shift that marked a break from its origins among the city's mining-era elite.
- Cecil Rhodes helped choose the site for the clubhouse.
- The club did not open membership to people of any race or gender until 2016.
Photo: Janek Szymanowski (CC BY-SA 3.0)
History
Johannesburg did not exist before 1886, when the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand turned open farmland into a mining camp; within ten years its population passed 100,000. The wealth that followed built solid Edwardian-style institutions in place of the original tents and shacks: a private club for the mining elite completed in 1904, a post office finished in 1897 that briefly stood as the tallest building in the young city, and a city hall finished in 1914 on the eve of the First World War. Twentieth-century apartheid policy then reorganised the wider city into racially segregated townships and suburbs, leaving this original core as an administrative and commercial centre. Some of its Edwardian buildings survived intact; others did not, including a fire that gutted the post office in 2009.