Saturday 24 July 2010

Newtown

Our DSL still down at home but that didn't stop me having an extremely busy Saturday. Firstly Matthew and I went to The Compound FMX Park at Daytona to watch the pro freestyle motocross riders do their thing along with some amateurs. It was a dusty morning but fun did not end there. In the afternoon I joined the Joburg Photowalkers on the Worldwide Photowalk in Newtown. After a lot of walking and gigabytes of photographs later we ended up at the Market Theater for drinks. So today’s photo is of the old Park Halt Station structure. According to the Newtown website the structure was designed by Dutch architect Jacob Klinkhamer (1854 - 1928) in 1895 after being commissioned by the ZAR government. It was originally manufactured in Rotterdam and re-erected at Park Station between 1896 and 1897. (I am not sure about the "manufactured in Rotterdam" part because on the steel columns was stamped "Pletterij den Haag" – Steel Plate Works of the Hague).The structure is an excellent example of late nineteenth-century building technology. In 1952, as part of the renewal of Park Station, the steel canopy was dismantled and re-erected in Kempton Park as a training centre for railway personnel. In 1995 the old structure was once again dismantled and re-erected in its current position, Newtown.

1 comment:

Jerome West said...

My friend Jeroen found this information "seems the Newtown website is mistaken or incomplete, as the 'Pletterij Den Haag' aka Enthoven was a huge iron foundry in The Hague that had 800 employees around 1860 (and also 2 factories in present-day Indonesia). It did all kinds of things from bridges, cast-iron gates and gas lanterns to station buildings and ZAR Post Boxes (one of those still stands in Lydenburg, a national monument). More here: http://www.facebook.com/l/5aa42;historie.residentie.net/enthoven.htm. Could be that a Rotterdam company gathered the whole structure together and shipped it, though"

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