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Stories untold

> Promenade Lifetime > Sea Point > Stories untold

A historical investigation into the Sea Point beachfront as a public open space throughout the 20th century with special reference to memories of growing up along the Sea Point Promenade by Leila Emdon.

Chapter One continued

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Stories untold

The literature available about Sea Point is very scarce. Most of the writing about Sea Point happened in the 1960s. Marischal Murray’s Under Lions Head appeared in 1964 and the Sea Point Boys School published their book Beneath the Lions Bold in 1963. In 1975, Noreen Kagan completed a UCT history honours thesis entitled The Growth and Development of the Municipality of Green and Sea Point.

After that one of the few things published about Sea Point was Martine Sindler’s marketing thesis An Investigation into the Attitudes and Perceptions of the Residents towards Sea Point as an Attractive Area to live in.(1994). This was a well-researched project and helps explaining many of the changes that happened in the early nineties.

The latest work published about Sea Point is also from the University of Cape Town. This is M. Paulse’s Oral History of Tramway Road and Ilford Street, Sea Point, 1930’s-2001: The Production of Place by Race, Class and Gender.

Although these sources proved very useful to me, I aimed with this project to bring something new to the body of Sea Point knowledge. I saw that there lacked a history of Sea Point based on memory and oral testimony. I believe that it is by recording and analysing oral history that others and I can understand Sea Point’s history from a personal perspective. Without the stories and memories of people, the promenade’s history would not be as important.

I used the sources as a way to summarise twentieth century Sea Point, but then used questionnaires and interviews to build up a narrative of what it was like to live in Sea Point in the past. I interviewed people from different age groups to build the story and incorporate pictures of memories. By interviewing people I came to see a common theme amongst people’s memories. This was that when people have fond memories about Sea Point or the promenade, they refer to their childhoods as well as their adolescence to late teenage years. It seems that promenade served as the ideal place to be young and many people spent the best part of their youth on the sea front. This was because of the vast amount of activities available to young people, the beach, as well as the fact that there were so many children living in Sea Point, much more so than today. The focus will therefore be on youth and how young people used this area. The promenade was also popular for its visual qualities and, therefore, photographs form part of this historical narrative.

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