Page 27 - Bulletin 17 2013

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scheme of a decade earlier. The City Engineer on 7 February 1924 recommended as

follows (MM 1925: 35-36):

 a promenade footway (concrete slabs) 30 ft. wide on the seaside with a

carriageway (bituminous macadam) of 30 ft.
 a short sea wall opposite the railway station.

 an ornamental rock wall supporting a sloping bank.

 an outer promenade footway on a reinforced concrete deck on concrete piles –
heavy seas able to spend themselves beneath.

 shelters along a brightly lit promenade.

 a 50 ft roadways linking the end of the promenade with Vlei Rd and widening of
Beach Rd from the vlei mouth to its junction with Atlantic Rd.

 parking for cars and development of gardens and recreation grounds.

 bathing boxes.

Together with a new pavilion made of reinforced concrete the total cost would be
£175,000 – this was more than double the cost of the Adderley Street Pier and Foreshore

Improvements of ten years earlier. A special Bill of Parliament was required to allow the
City tenure of the foreshore between H & LWM and this was promulgated on 16 July

1925. It had been hoped to include proposals for the improvement of Zandvlei but the

complex legal situation comprising many separate ownerships and rights forestalled this.
It had been intended to dredge and deepen it for sailing and rowing activities because of

the problem of low water during the four summer months. Attention would be given to
this only much later.

Council believed that “…. the adequate development of the Muizenberg foreshore – an
asset such as no other South African watering-place possesses – cannot fail to add to the

prosperity of the City as a whole, and to the proud reputation of the Cape Peninsula as
one of the beauty spots of the world.” (MM 1925: 37.)