Durban - The old pictures this week look at the Durban Pavilion which burnt down in the late 1930s and was never rebuilt.
The first picture taken from the front of the Pavilion strangely had a 1981 date on it. It can only be assumed it was republished in 1981 and that the earlier original caption was lost. Presumably there was something newsworthy about the site the old Pavilion was built on.
Initially photographer Shelley Kjonstad and I were unsure of its exact location, assuming it was on the open patch of lawns at the bottom of KE Masinga (Old Fort) Road, near the Pavilion Hotel which is still trading today.
It was only when reader Pat Mackenzie Hutton sent us the second picture of North Beach from the 1930s that we confirmed our suspicion was correct. If you look carefully at the architecture from the roof gables to the windows in the round turrets, it’s clearly the same building.
Mackenzie Hutton’s picture also takes in the Durban amphitheatre which was designed by architect William Murray Jones and constructed in 1934. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the city undertook a number of infrastructure projects to keep people employed and this was one of them. It was probably taken soon after the amphitheatre and Sunken Gardens were finished because on the left of the picture you can still see rubble that needed to be removed.
In the foreground is Grosvenor Court, which was built in 1936 and designed by architect Arthur Stanley Furner. The tower block was added onto the back of the block in the 1960s. Behind the Pavilion is the old Seaside Hotel, which today is Windermere, an apartment block. The Pavilion Hotel is in the block behind Windermere, and would have faced the south side of the old Durban Pavilion.
Built in 1913 and extensively refurbished in 2009, the three-star Pavilion Hotel today has 111 en-suite rooms, a restaurant, bar and conferencing facilities, and secure parking.
There is little information on the Durban Pavilion itself, with even the all-knowing Facts About Durban website only having three snippets on it.
It was presumably built in the same period as the Pavilion Hotel which was when Durban’s beachfront was being developed.
In one a woman who lived in Durban in the 1930s and was part of the Moth Women’s Association recalls the city giving them the use of the old tea room from the Pavilion after the structure burnt down, and how they had worked to make it accommodate servicemen who stopped or were stationed in Durban during World War II. Another is from a pamphlet for servicemen advertising the Stand Easy Club at the Pavilion Tea Room on the corner of Old Fort Road and Marine Parade, presumably the same building.
The Pavilion was also the scene of a grand fancy dress ball in March 1934 when His Royal Highness Prince George (later George VI) visited the city, as advertised in a commemorative booklet printed for the occasion.
In the modern picture of the North Beach scene, Shelley Kjonstad shot from the pool deck of the Southern Sun Elangeni and Maharani Hotel to get the height required to survey the Amphitheatre, but Grosvenor Court blocks out a lot of the Pavilion site.
The Independent on Saturday