The Changing Face of Woodstock

woodstock is wedged between the suburbs and the city like a dirty dishcloth. drifting in a river of traffic from both major highways and the trunk of cape town’s train routes. the area’s light industrial open spaces with cheaper rents and victorian cottages with renovation potential have pulled in mobs of converse and brogue wearing creative types (a lot of them who look like jesus). here the disciples of design are busy building craft furniture and roasting imported coffee while selling art and riding fixies. it’s becoming a factory of gritty cool but in a conscience-striking way which means street kids watch you chew your R65 egg-on-toasted-rye sandwich. about a hundred years and fifty ago Woodstock was a fashionable seaside suburb with cottages next to a now nonexistent shoreline. Fortune seemed to dry up with the extending foreshore reclamation in the 40′s although it remained a ‘grey area’ during apartheid and saved itself from the fate of District 6. it’s manic streets are lined with factories, garages and antique shops with white lined colonial facades like white lipstick. Characters out of penguin classic novel busy themselves selling vintage furniture like they were letting go symbols of the past. Some of cape town’s oldest companies still have head offices here. The 102 year-old House of Monato or the 75 year-old Lewis. Most of them ache in buildings decaying without time’s usual charm. Romantic if you give it another 45 years. Big bold insustrial fonts tell you people are doing hard work inside auto repair garages, linen shops and bottle stores. vinyl cutouts in sans serif use words like ‘contemporary’ and ‘craft’ to tell you somebody inside is busy working on something for a blog. These are some of the only buildings in cape town where you can get a leather iPad cover on one side and TIK on the other. there’s chemical stench of piss in gutters between cafe and panel beaters and huge black faces with silent screams covering the side-street walls. spray-painted Faith47 angels turn there heads from poverty and weep on gothic slabs that spell big themes like FREEDOM CHARTER. hard faces harass me under a sign that says JESUS SAVES COME TO HIM. I’m not sure if they want my cellphone or my soul.

traffic in woodstock has its own rules and driving in the rain through Albert and Victoria roads is like a free course in anger management. woodstock also has the entire curve of the Gini coefficient strolling its streets. Range Rovers pause for crutching beggars. It’s an entire spectrum of South African culture mixing flavors, colors and symbols like visual mezze platter. it’s definitely on the fringes and if you’re into books by malcom gladwell types it’s on the fringes where you’ll find the center of change and the new.