Durban - The old picture of Durban this week shows the bottom of West Street, today Dr Pixley kaSeme Street, looking towards the sea and shows Durban’s famed Beach Hotel. It was probably taken in 1920s or 1930s.
The Beach Hotel was one of the first hotels on Durban’s beachfront. It was then known as Back Beach because originally the city’s main beach was the “sandy shore” along what is today the Esplanade.
The present beachfront was a series of high sand dunes which were levelled and developed between 1906 and 1909, with the extension of West Street and the building of the Marine Parade. This was as the development of shipping wharves in the bay became a priority and the old beachfront had to give way.
Poet Roy Campbell, in his autobiography Light on a Dark Horse, recalls “playing there when it was a mass of dunes, with only one tin shanty of a so-called hotel made of wood and iron. It charged 10/6 a day for full board.
The Beach Hotel developed into a Durban institution and in the 1960s transformed into a multistorey building. In 2019, the hotel sadly closed and it was announced that its rooms would make way for student accommodation.
Shelley Kjonstad’s picture taken this week shows a very different scene.
The Independent on Saturday