Page 54 - Bulletin 13 2009

51

THE MAKING OF MAIN ROAD, 1742 - 1930

Barrie Gasson

Introduction

A talk on the making of main road is timeous, given the work that got underway early in
2008 and is set to continue for some time. Main Road reached its present form and

dimensions between 1914 and 1930 – beyond living memory for almost everyone living
in this area. The sub-surface services had been put in even earlier – certainly beyond

living memory.

Geographically, Main Road is the 26-mile link between Table Bay and Simon’s Bay,

and it has a recorded history spanning perhaps 300 years. So the subject is a large one

and for this reason the focus will be on the Muizenberg – Fish Hoek section, but
including the sections to Simon’s Town and northwards beyond Muizenberg, as seems

necessary. Temporally, the story begins in the years after 1742, when Simon’s Town
became the Cape’s winter anchorage and had to be connected by road to Cape Town.

Four eras of road building are involved.

Era 1: 1742–1806 - The DEIC Years: A Sandy Track

It has been said that the DEIC did very little work of a technical nature during their

roughly 150 years at the Cape. They constructed a small mole in Table Bay, did some
water “leading”, constructed a few buildings and maintained them. (Snape, 1916). Road

construction was rudimentary and the most important route was the wagon road that led
out of the Table Valley following the bend of the mountain through Mowbray to

Westerford where it branched: one route went to the forests at Newlands and Hout Bay,

while the other went on to Wynberg from where it swung westwards to the main
farmsteads of Klaasenbosch, Groot Constantia and Steenberg.