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Confidence was so low that no bid exceeded £100 - a quarter the price that they would
have fetched ten years earlier. Cohen refused to sell the land at such a low price

although one sale at £125 was negotiated. Isidore Cohen did not lose faith in the area.
Instead he bought another 617 plots below Camps Bay Drive in the area called Brighton

Estate, a name dating to the 1806 name for the Old Homestead. Within a year Brighton

Court with ten flats had been built on the site of the tram-sheds and other buildings soon
followed.

In 1939/1940 subdivisions were approved and a township was laid out with the plots for

sale at £250 apiece. (Fig. 5.7) With war on, sales in the new township were slow at the
beginning but Cohen promised to reserve plots for ex-servicemen at low prices, and

where Farquhar had laid down restrictions, Cohen removed them.

In the same way that he had made it easy to own furniture, Cohen made home

ownership easy. By removing difficulties in planning, building and owning houses in

the new suburb, Cohen made Camps Bay an area into which young couples would want
to move because of the convenience and ease of acquiring a new home. Everything was

done to make the township desirable. Roads were laid at the expense of the Company in
advance of the development so that early access to the new dwelling was not by sand

tracks. One of their first advertisements stressed the ease of acquiring a new house
there. (Fig. 5.8)

“The desire to possess a home and the ground upon which it stands is one of the most
outstanding attributes of the human race. To live with your family in the security of

your own home is indeed a worthy ambition... Camps Bay Estate ... possesses every
present and future attraction for the potential home owner. Those of you who read the

newspapers will doubtless have seen that this Estate has been purchased by a new
Company. The extent of the property is vast, approximately 1,000 acres, and it is being

subdivided into building lots to meet the requirements of every section of the

community.....Camps Bay is no further from the top of Adderley Street than