STORY 75
The Helderberg did not develop in isolated chapters of farming, industry or coastal defence. It developed in overlapping layers, roads, factories, military positions and communities that rose, shifted and sometimes disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. When seen together, these layers form a single story of how the landscape was reshaped by twentieth century infrastructure.
Readers of this book will already know the broad outline of the N2’s arrival in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the padkamp at Eerste River that lived and died in the space of a construction contract and the freeway’s halt at what is now the R44 interchange, stopped by the settled community of Paardevlei and the concrete slab beneath the modern surface that still marks a road that never went further. That story, told in full elsewhere in this book, is one of the clearest examples of a community shaping infrastructure rather than the other way around.
But the N2 was only one layer among several and the others deserve their own attention.
As the freeway advanced it passed through the industrial edge of the Helderberg and into the orbit of Gants. What had once been part of the old Gants Farm gradually transformed into one of the region’s most important industrial zones. By the 1970s the name Gants no longer referred to open farmland but to factories, workshops and commercial yards that formed a new economic spine between Strand and Somerset West. Where wagons and orchards once stood, trucks and warehouses now defined the rhythm of daily life. The transformation was gradual and largely undocumented in any single record. It happened field by field and lease by lease, as farmland became first workshops, then light industry, then the commercial and retail character that the name Gants carries today. Few of the people who now shop or work on that ground would recognise it as farmland at all and fewer still would know that its name once belonged to a family and a harvest rather than a shopping centre signboard.
Further along the coastline, another layer of infrastructure tells a different story entirely. At the mouth of the Steenbras River, concrete gun emplacements from the Second World War still overlook False Bay. During the war this coastline formed part of a wider defensive system protecting the Cape sea route, one of the most strategically important shipping lanes in the southern hemisphere at a time when the Suez Canal was closed to Allied shipping and every vessel moving between Europe and the East had to round the Cape. The guns at Steenbras never fired in anger. Their purpose was deterrence rather than combat, a visible signal to any enemy vessel that the coastline was watched and defended. Today they lie silent, eroded by salt and wind, but still aligned toward a horizon once considered vulnerable to attack. Very few Helderberg residents know they are there. Fewer still have walked out to see them.
Taken individually, Gants, Paardevlei, the N2, Eerste River and Steenbras belong to different categories of history, industry, community, transport and war. But viewed together they form a continuous Helderberg narrative, a landscape repeatedly reshaped by movement. Movement of soldiers, workers, engineers, goods and ideas. Some movements left permanent infrastructure. Others left only traces. And some, like the stopped freeway, left behind a decision that still defines daily life in the valley.
Every journey through the Helderberg today passes through this layered history, often unnoticed but always present beneath the surface of roads, towns and coastline.
Between You and Me:
Reading back through this book, I notice how often the same handful of place names recur, each time from a slightly different angle. Paardevlei is a wetland, then a factory, then a nuclear test site, then a shopping centre, then a reason the freeway stopped. Gants is a farm, then a canning factory, then an industrial zone, then a name on a shopping centre sign. The Lourens River is a water source, then a flood risk, then a heritage bridge, then a wetland. Nothing in this valley has just one story. Everything has at least three, stacked on top of each other and most of the time we only see whichever one happens to be visible from the road on the day we drive past.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: a bridge over the Lourens River that almost nobody stops to look at and the reason it is still standing after everything else around it has been rebuilt.
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