At home in Illovo

I realised I was becoming attached to my new neighbourhood, Illovo, sometime after the barista at my nearest coffee shop started greeting me by my first name. A very simple gesture and not surprising considering how friendly Jozis are. But it was recognition from a stranger that only comes from the repetition of ordinary, daily life: the same coffee order, the same walk there each morning, the same exchanged pleasantries. And then suddenly, without really noticing when it happened, you’re no longer just passing through a place. You belong to its routines. You’ve become a regular; maybe even local.

Our local coffee spot

For me, Joburg stopped feeling foreign fairly quickly. I like to think I’m a fairly resilient person (lol). Moving to a new city of course isn't easy but overall, I have simply got on with it. The practicalities settle first. You learn your new routines, where to buy groceries, how to navigate the city without thinking too hard about it. Soon enough, the strangeness of it all fades away. But feeling at home has been much slower. And the last couple of weeks, I’ve started noticing how familiar my surroundings have become. Our apartment, and neighbourhood, have slowly transformed from a place we just live into somewhere that feels, unexpectedly, like ours.

We live in Dunkeld Mansions, an apartment building built in 1939 on the border of Illovo, Dunkeld and Melrose. I love our apartment - the first thing I noticed when we viewed it were the windows and the parquet floors. The windows stretch floor to ceiling and in the mornings, the parquet flooring glows amber in the sunlight. Like many of the older apartment buildings scattered around this part of Johannesburg, Dunkeld Mansions has real character, the kind that only seems to come from buildings constructed in a different era, before developers started valuing efficiency over personality.

Designed by architect Harold Le Roith, the building was influenced by the modernist architecture emerging in Europe in the 1930s, with its curved lines, generous proportions and emphasis on light and openness. Some have compared it to an ocean liner, which feels oddly accurate from the inner atrium. There is something comforting about living somewhere with history and texture. It makes a place feel lived in long before you arrive, and somehow, that makes it easier to make yourself at home there too.

Inner atrium of Dunkeld Mansions

The 1930s architecture is prevalent throughout the wider neighbourhood too and walking around here sometimes feels like wandering through a strangely displaced version of suburban England. The roads I walk my dog in remind me of Beckenham, where I went to school in south-east London. And the comparison is not entirely imagined. Both suburban London and northern Johannesburg expanded rapidly during the same period, shaped by many of the same architectural influences coming out of Europe - modernism, art deco, and inspired by the idea of communal living.

The naming of this area is deeply colonial. Dunkeld and Melrose themselves are Scottish place names, imported onto the Highveld in the same way so many Johannesburg suburbs were during the city’s early expansion. The apartment blocks followed suit - Kent Place North, Aston Villa East, North Atherstone - little fragments of Britain scattered across the city by developers and planners trying to lend these new suburbs a sense of refinement and familiarity.

Dunkeld Mansions from Oxford Road

That familiarity was never neutral. In the 1930s and 40s, these northern suburbs were being shaped as largely white spaces, built around a vision of suburban life imported from Europe and reserved for only some of the people living in Johannesburg. Walking these streets as a white British person nearly a century later, I’m conscious that part of what feels ordinary to me is precisely that inheritance. It feels recognisable. Not exactly, but atmospherically. Like somewhere I’ve been before, filtered through another continent.

Maybe that’s partly why this neighbourhood has settled under my skin. Of course, a sense home is shaped largely by the people you share your life with. But, for me, it is also deeply attached to place: to the streets you know by memory, the cafés that recognise you, the apartment where you feel most safe.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog describing Johannesburg as ugly (read here) and in many ways, I still stand by what I meant. It is not an immediately beautiful city. But I think living somewhere changes the way you see it. My admiration for Joburg doesn't come from what is physically in front of me but is now attached to my sense of belonging here. Considering I had never even visited Johannesburg before moving here, I’ve surprised myself by my ability to uproot my entire life, adapt and feel at home in a city which I would have never imagined that would be possible.

Notes from 26° South.