Pinelands, Cape Town

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OpenStreetMap map of Pinelands. See [1] for zoomable version.

The "garden city" suburb of Pinelands is located on the edge of the southern suburbs of Cape Town in South Africa and is known for its large thatched houses. The suburb is primarily residential and is often praised for its peacefulness and abundance of trees. Pinelands is one of the few areas in Cape Town in which sale of alcohol is prohibited and is a popular place for senior citizens to retire to. While there are several retirement homes in the suburb, younger people are increasingly moving in and it has become one of the most racially-mixed middle class suburbs in Cape Town.

The main road is called Forest Drive and the suburb contains two small shopping centres, namely Howard Centre (named after Ebenezer Howard who led the garden city movement) and Central Square. Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist churches are located near to Central Square, while Baptist and Catholic churches are located elsewhere in the suburb. Pinelands is served by two railway stations: Pinelands Station on the western edge of the suburb and Mutual Station on the northern edge. The suburb is bisected from the north east to the south west by the Elsieskraal River, which has flowed through a large concrete drainage canal since the 1960s.

The postcodes for Pinelands are 7405 for street addresses and 7430 for post office boxes. The telephone exchange code for Pinelands is pre-dominantly 531 (within the 021 dialling code for Cape Town). In local elections, Pinelands forms part of ward 53 of the City of Cape Town.

1 History
2 Demographics
3 Road names
4 Schools
5 Sports
6 References
7 External links

[edit] History

View of the commemorative founding stone and sundial in Central Square park.

The layout of Pinelands is based on the revolutionary town planning ideas of Sir Ebenezer Howard, and was the first attempt at a town-planned area in South Africa. Pinelands was originally a Victorian era farm named Uitvlugt that had thousands of pine trees planted in it, and was later deemed an economic failure by the Department of Forestry. The land was then granted to "The Garden Cities Trust" and the founding Deed of Trust was signed in 1919. One of the first members of the trust, Richard Stuttaford (head of the department store Stuttafords), made a £10,000 gift donation to serve as capital, and a loan of £15,000 from the government was invested in Pinelands. The trust brought in an overseas expert, Albert John Thompson, in 1920 to design the area.

The first (thatched) house in Pinelands was built in Mead Way in February 1922. The house and entire street were declared a national monument in 1983. New thatched roof houses have not been permitted due to the fire hazard for many years. Pinelands converted to a municipality in 1948 and has since been merged into the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality.

[edit] Demographics

Pinelands is a mainly English-speaking white community, with smaller numbers of white Afrikaners and non-whites living there.

[edit] Road names

Many of the road names in Pinelands have originated from local history or from places in England. One road is named Uitvlugt after the farm of the same name that covered what is now Pinelands and there are roads are named Letchworth and Welwyn after the first two garden cities in England. There are also roads in Pinelands named after places in the Lake District in England, as well as the names of birds, trees and flowers.