Page 86 - KBHA Bulletin 12

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A plan of Simon’s Town was drawn up by surveyor/architect Louis Michel Thibault in
1814 – as painstakingly accurate as one could wish for any town. It shows all the naval

buildings on the foreshore, including the old postholder’s house and the residency
(today a most interesting museum). The promontory of Cole Point juts out far enough to

form a sheltered anchorage; the only actual harbour structure at that stage being the

barely forty-metres-long pier. But of most interest to us is what Thibault tells us about
the emergence of a veritable little town above the road. Over a distance of more than

half a kilometre there is an almost unbroken row of buildings, mostly private dwellings,
in the narrow strip between road and mountainside. Their erection in many cases

demanded substantial excavations, the rubble of which was used as landfill in the
dockyard area below. Thibault’s map also shows two ‘garden’ areas, the one in the deep

ravine above Admiralty House being the original Company’s Garden, the other, further

south on a slight plateau up the hill, that of the private farm Goede Gift.

The Thibault town is in essence still that which we admire so much today. Though

largely unplanned, it is the finest urban environment in the Peninsula. While central
Cape Town never fully consummated its wonderful setting between mountain and bay,

Simon’s Town did so to the full. The narrowness of the strip available for building ruled
out a grid-pattern layout. Only a few narrow sloping lanes and contour streets – all

largely retaining their character – could be added to the main road development.
Simon’s Town is today still a sea-fronting harbour town of the highest order. Only on

the slightly flatter slopes of the Kloof expansion took place in the form of the small villa

precinct of Mount Pleasant, and deeper into the ravine, the residential area forcibly
vacated under the Group Areas Act in 1975. During the war years a most unusual

township for Black dockyard workers, a community of a thousand or more, was built on
terraced strips up the steep slope of the kloof. Luyola, too, was cleared in 1975, but the

terraces are still clearly visible. The valley bottom came in handy to establish a ‘rope
walk’, an essential element in any naval establishment.

Despite the strong British presence, the town as mapped by Thibault still had a strong
‘Cape Dutch’ character in its architecture. Artist Schonegevel in c.1856 shows the row