Long Street is the heart and soul of Cape Town, and has been for many year.
"Long Street has always been my favourite street. As a schoolboy I left my classmates eating dull sandwiches in the playground while I hurried down Long Street to the cafe of my vhoice. Long Street provided a great deal of free entertainment in those days, from barrel organs to German bands...Malays settled in Long Street when it was one of the town's boundary streets and they have never departed...Cape Town's old artists seem to have been fond of Long Street. The celebrated Wilhelm Langschmidt lived there...John Rowland Brown, a deaf and dumb artist, was brought up in the orphanage at the top of Long Street, the historic weeshuis that stood next to the German Lutheran Church for nearly 150 years...The orphanage was started early last century by Mrs Margaretha Moller, a rich widow, as a home for 'respectable forlorn women'. The orphanage came later with Thibault as the probable designer. This was the first orphanage in South Africa and it was built of brick set in clay. One huge room, shaped like a cross, ran the whole length and depth of the building...It had become a street of shops but it was known as 'the lodging street' because so many people lived over the shops. Soon after WWII I met a woman who had lived with her parents in Long Street during the sixties of last century. She was Mrs Maria Mitchell, daughter of a Scottish fisherman. Her father landed snoek at Rogge Bay and sold them for a penny each, while a silver fish cost a tickey. Mrs Mitchell told me that she started work at the age of 12, sweeping the floor of Saul Solomon's printing works and picking up lead type. At the age of 90 she could still read the tiny 6-point type without glasses. 'Long Street was such a safe place when I was a child that we often slept with the front door open...Everything was so cheap, peaches cost a shilling a hundred, mutton was 2 pence a pound.' When I first came to know Long Street, round about the time of Union, you looked towards the mountain and saw trees and and old estates rather than tower blocks. Oranjezicht was still a farm. Over on the Devil's Peak slopes was the rambling homestead called Mount Prospect, with its vineyard and gardens. Verdehoek, the Mellish farm, was close by, and this was still a farm during WWI and for some years afterwards, a farm that was gradually surrounded by the city.
Long Street had tram lines running in the dead centre. I remember a watchmaker named Speight whose claim to fame rested on a golden model of the Albert Memorial which he had made; the Sultan of Johore presented it to Queen Victoria as a jubilee gift. Jagger's boot factory, with 5 storeys, was about the tallest building in the street. Dix's Cafe (established in 1845) was there; for many years the only restaurant worthy of the name." Lawrence G Green