City Hall is not everybody’s favourite, I know that, but the building and its streetscape is impressive. From the pedestrian crossing in Church Square you get this sweeping view of the clock tower, the Victorian frontage of Birch’s, a glimpse of the ornate towers on Commemoration Church and then onwards down High Street to Makana;s Kop on the skyline. The foundation stone was laid in 1877 and it was completed in 1882. On the ground floor the City Hall originally housed the 15,000 volumes of the Public Library with the Albany museum collection on the first floor.

Tracking down the 70 Heritage Sites of old Grahamstown has sometimes taken time but it’s always brought rewards. The Old Wesleyan Chapel and Church Hall at Fort England is a good example. Thanks to the co-operation of the staff there – particularly Dr Mo Nagdee and Mr Iain Reid – I was granted permission to take photographs within the grounds and given a tour of the site. Here’s the result.

There’s a small mention of the chapel in Whiteside’s 1906 History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of South Africa.

“As Grahamstown extended suburban churches were erected – one at West Hill, in the year 1860, the foundation stone of which was laid by Mrs Impey, daughter of the Reverend W Shaw, and another at Fort England, not far from the house occupied by Sergeant Lucas, in which Mr Shaw preached on his first visit to Grahamstown.” Shaw’s first visit was in 1820. The Fort England site was then known as East Barrack Hill. The South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) gives the date of the Old Wesleyan chapel as 1861.

As many of you know I’ve been photographing Grahamstown’s Heritage sites over the past year. There are 70 of them so it’s a bit of a challenge to draft a poster for the whole series.
This is the composite image that I have been working on lately. It uses the sepia style that I have been experimenting with and is an overlay of many layers. Church Square is the bottom layer, then I painted in the Rhodes main building next. On top of that comes the towers and turrets of the Observatory Museum. Then, if you look carefully, you can just see the lettering ‘Church’ and ‘1820′ from the front of the Baptist Church. Lastly there’s the man with umbrella in Fingo Village and directly above him is the Monument building in the sky above town.

It’s not every month that we are featured in Go! magazine – so this week’s picture was an easy choice. It’s a screenshot for September’s featured trail ‘The Oldenburgia Day Trail’ – a two page spread with four of my pictures illustrating it. If you’ve visited the exhibition in Café Delizzia then you’ll have seen two of them ’The Rock Garden’ and ‘Oldenburgia.’ Go take a look!

There’s a big concentration of Heritage Sites around Church Square – so it’s an obvious choice for one of my retro-styled Heritage Series pictures. This was taken from outside Birch’s last Sunday as I didn’t want all of the vehicles that fill the Square on weekdays in the shot. It was a warm sunny afternoon with beautiful clouds and a deep blue winter sky – so excellent conditions.
The colour version of the image is full of rich saturated colours that I’ve bleached out. To get the retro affect I’ve applied a sepia ‘vintage’ filter that emulates the Fuji Neopan Acros 100 film.

Standing between the Monument and the N2 is Ivan Mitford-Barberton’s 1969 Settler Family statue. I’ve made a slightly unusual composition by focussing on the little girl looking rather pensively up at her mother (as if for reassurance). Father and mother, meanwhile, gaze resolutely out into the distance. I used a fish-eye lens to bring out the shape of the dresses and it’s given a pleasing, harmonious, triangular shape to the family group.