Page 75 - Bulletin 12 2008

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parts not only of Oude Wynberg and Kleine Oude Wynberg but also of the farms
Petersklip and Vredenhof were subdivided into erven, on an irregular pattern, for a town

was never proclaimed or laid out, some with existing huurhuisies on them. Retired
businessmen, farmers and Indian army officers swelled the number of permanent

residents of the village.

But although the area had a substantial proportion of English-speaking residents, its first

church congregation was a Dutch Reformed one, and a church was started in 1831, soon
to be followed by an Anglican church – events which could perhaps be said to have

signalled its birth as a town. Up to then it had had an indistinct ‘axis’, with thatched
cottages and houses scattered along the winding old wagon-road, today Tennant and

Aliwal roads and Wolfe Street, at the end of which a branch split off towards

Constantia.

The new church introduced the first semblance of formality into the thus-far informal

settlement. As early as 1813 Thibault had shown a path following the course of present-
day Church Street, along the boundary of Maynardville to the (then quite new) main

road. An 1830 plan by surveyor J Knobel sets out the church site, and carries the axis of
Carr Hill, with the new church at the top, right down to the present main road, which it

intersects at right angles. The church is still the main landmark in old Wynberg today,
though now cruciform and Victorianised. Neither the Anglican church of St. John’s

slightly higher up nor the 1851 Methodist church lower down in Church Street played

as important a role in the villagescape as their Dutch Reformed counterpart. In 1839
Wynberg became a magistracy and by this time it also had its pub, shops and its proud

double-storey ‘municipal offices’.

The surviving ‘Old Wynberg Village’ consists of an elongated area of about 500 by 150
metres, round the pincer-like intersection of Wolfe Street – the old wagon-road – and

Durban Road. Between the two run several delightful little streets of which Victoria

Street is the best preserved. At this end of Durban Road some ‘homestead’-type houses
survive: well-preserved Long Cottage and, both pre-existing, Vredenhof and Tenterden.