Page 60 - Bulletin 23- 2020

56

Each day, as we visited marinas and waterside housing developments in Europe and North
America, it became clearer how the character of each development is defined by their

waterside banks.

In Holland and the UK, we visited some particularly unattractive sites, where the banks were
muddy and unstabilised and in the US we saw others that were hard-line, like a swimming

bath. We saw untidy banks protected by loose and gabion-wired stone and many others with
harsh piled vertical surfaces of asbestos/cement, wood steel and concrete. We even saw one

with an overhang to hide the floating refuse.

We had been directed by our Planners to a housing development called Westlake, north of
Los Angeles, where we found the banks to be outstandingly attractive. They had been built in

soil-cement and were artificially weathered and stained to look natural. I was told that this
work had been done by a fireman, Julian George and his colleagues, working on their off-

days.

After out return to South Africa I was given the services of the Anglo American Plant
Nursery staff and asked to replicate the Westlake banks. Whereas at Westlake the work had

been done in the dry, at Sandvlei we were going to have to work in the more difficult wet
conditions at the edge of the existing vlei.

We worked for two weeks and our experimental efforts at Sandvlei were judged to be
“good”, but the consensus was that they were “not as good as Westlake”.

Two weeks later, Julian George and his fireman partner, Frank Manwarren, arrived in Cape
Town. Early the following morning the CCC Amenities Committee visited Sandvlei to meet

with the visitors. By the time they arrived, Julian George had already ripped out the existing
CCC wooden bank with an excavator and was busy crafting his natural-looking stabilised

bank. The Committee was horrified at the hasty action but applauded their work.

With our team’s help, they produced about 100m of superbly crafted, natural-looking soil-

cement bank in just two days. Their sample stands near the Playwater’s picnic site. (Figs.

2.20 & 2.21.)

56