Typical Lower-Income District Six Home
Cape Town (1920-1950)
From the early 1900’s onwards, members of the Cape Town’s upper and middle-classes began to vacate the inner city, choosing instead to live in the more spacious outer suburbs of Mowbray, Rondebosch and Claremont. Increasing poverty and overcrowding in the inner-city was both a cause and an effect of this migration. As such housing conditions within areas like District Six, Woodstock and the City Bowl were often extremely poor.
The model below shows, based on the descriptions of St. Monica’s staff, what the living quarters in these areas looked like; cramped rooms shared by multiple families, mud floors, crumbling walls and few, if any, amenities.
In some cases a piece of cheap cloth would be used to create a divide and allow for some privacy between the rooms different inhabitants. A single bed (usually just a mattress on the floor) often accommodated three or more people. Water would usually have to be collected and food cooked over a gas stove or an open hearth (shack fires were relatively common).
Individuals within these areas often suffered from both over and under-exposure. Windows were something of a luxury and many homes lacked sufficient light and fresh air. At the same time, though, cracked walls and a lack of solid roofing could also easily lead to flooding and extreme cold. The long, narrow nature of many of these homes had to do with not only with frequent subdivision but also with the fact that many inner city dwellings were constructed from old stables and in some (albeit relatively rare) cases from ex-slave quarters.