V&A Waterfront: consuming itself, a greedy bite at a time

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 in Cape Town 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 (unless you count the ever-obscure fast food section, which has always seemed like a reluctant sop to the rank and file) 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.

And off it goes again...

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 restaurant and bar is promised in that “new” precinct, along with all manner of delights (as if there aren’t already too many in the Mother City, let alone the Waterfront).

The mysteries within are all hidden behind giant bunting.

The “old” Alfred Mall and hotel reopened recently after a thorough refit. The NSRI building and quay are in the throes of a necessary upgrade. New shops shine and preen alongside. Before long, this entire precinct, but for the original Victoria Wharf Mall (faux as it is), will be unrecognisable to anyone who remembers it when it all started. Quay Four, miraculously, seems to defy everything – developers, the fates, God, the universe, the writing on the wall, time itself – and yet it goes on, a stubborn reminder that Not Everything Has To Change. And does anyone, anywhere, even remember Bertie’s Landing, or try, now, to pinpoint quite where it was? Case, rested. (Mind you, even Quay Four cannot last forever; at some point, some or other Bright Young Thing with cash to burn will get them out.) And there is of course Ferrymans, whose regular clientele would be likely to see off any interference swiftly.

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The Cape Grace Hotel, once one of the prized Waterfront locations, now seems an outlier, a relic, amid the ever-burgeoning developments in every direction. The Clock Tower precinct seems more remote than ever, if you can even find it anymore, unless you’re arriving from Robben Island. Makers Landing is still there, somewhere, in its panhandle obscurity, out of sight to almost everything else, and you have to wonder why these “makers” who deserved a leg-up weren’t offered a more visible, accessible venue. Like, say, the premises of the V&A Food Market which, as we know, has been shut in the name of change and advancement.

A wasteland separating city from sea

But let’s go back a while. To 1976, when this then very young reporter was the assistant to the Cape Times Shipping Editor, George Young, and even then I was returning to my old haunt, because when I was a teenager at Sea Point Boys High, I was an infamous and inveterate truant who spent his mornings wandering around the docks when he should have been at school. I boarded every passenger liner and knew the layout of Duncan Dock and the adjacent Alfred Basin better than my own home. Now, I’d be lost.

When I look at the Victoria Wharf with its faux Victorian features, I see it without its roof, a mass of sturdy girders buttressing the sky, bright blue above; long, sleek shadows cast by the spokes of steel, and a younger me in a yellow hard hat, being shown through the new building under construction by its architect, David Jack, once dubbed the man who reconnected the harbour with the city. And that he did. Might we ask him to reattach it?

The Alfred Basin precinct was something of a wasteland that separated the city from the sea. But it contained a number of desirable buildings, many of them Victorian, which were deemed worth repurposing as part of a new development. Alongside them, new buildings in the Victorian style were built, commencing with what soon became the Victoria Wharf mall which, I’m relieved to be able to say, is still intact, although there have been sensible upgrades without losing its substance. In fact, it is improved, with wide passageways having been carved out to allow access between what were two very long corridors; it was an obvious design fault in the original mall.

Thirty and more years later, having watched every shift and shuffle as the Waterfront management has endeavoured to remain vital and young, to keep the punters interested and aware, you can’t but admire their tenacity and resilience. They’ve led the way for the Mother City every year, month, week and hour since that day when the architect and visionary impressed the young journalist with what was happening. It has never ceased since that moment.

Change and renew, refresh and reassess

Now the older journalist has returned to find change again, and more, and more again, with nothing ever being left alone to be there and be used and, one day, to be remembered with affection. But nothing can be left alone any more. Nothing is allowed to become old and interesting. Everything must change and renew, refresh and reassess. Got to stay ahead of the game, don’t get left behind, if you rest on your laurels you’ll disintegrate, vapourise, become invisible and be forgotten. If this mindset were applied to our species, old people would be put down lest they offend the eyes and sensibilities of the young. Only the shiny and fresh are permitted.

One day, will I return again and find nothing at all that I remember from the Seventies or even the Nineties? Bearing in mind that everything there, at the end of the Eighties, was much as it had been in 1973.

The TimeOut market

I went back to the Waterfront with a mission to find out what another change was all about: the V&A Food Market was in the process of being replaced by a big “global” market called TimeOut, and if that name is instantly familiar, it’s because it is a venture begun by the Portuguese editorial crew of the famous magazine, and it has become a phenomenon in the world of food markets. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that there should be one at our V&A Market; let me be clear that I do not for a moment oppose the notion that we should have one.

The original TimeOut Market in Lisbon now has cousins in Chicago, New York, Miami, Boston, Dubai, Montreal, London and Prague. Now there is to be one in Cape Town, BUT… does it have to be on this site?

All the traders in the old Food Market near the (now revamped and upgraded) Alfred Mall, having endured and survived lockdown and managed to stay afloat, were rewarded by not having their contracts renewed. How’s that for a thank you? They might have expected a pat on the back. They got booted out. The place is bare. I went back earlier this month while visiting the city. This is what it looked like…

My questions are these: did it have to be this venue? Was there not another venue that would have sufficed? If the venue had become tired could it not have been given a facelift and relaunched using the same traders? Bring us a TimeOut Cape Town but not at the expense of these traders. Don’t change only because there is a culture of change, change and change again that has permeated the Waterfront since the first brick was laid in 1992.

The website for the original in Lisbon encapsulates the concept as follows: “A place that previously housed the city's best vendors now houses its best restaurants and artists. While the wares on offer may differ, the principle is the same: bringing the best of the city under one roof.”

The TimeOut Lisbon website paints this picture: 

“Why is a famous publishing name hanging from the roof of a historic market hall? And why is a team of journalists running one of the world’s largest gourmet food spaces? The answers to these questions are in the project’s name: TimeOut Market.

“A concept created from scratch in 2014 by the team at TimeOut Portugal, with only the best ideas and business projects in Lisbon – according to the editorial team – which can stay in the market from one week to three years. If it’s good, it goes in the magazine, if it’s great, it goes into the market.

“On the one hand, 26 restaurants, eight bars, a dozen shops and a high-end music venue, all with the very best in Lisbon (the best steak, the best hamburger, the best sushi and the best live performances, amongst others); on the other hand, home to some of the city’s best-known (and longest-running) market vendors of meat, fish, fruit and flowers.

“Today, together, both sides are proud of having turned the building, its immediate surroundings and the whole Cais do Sodré neighbourhood into a huge attraction for visitors, day and night.”

There’s a video on the TimeOut Lisbon website that shows us exactly what we can expect from any of their markets: