Houghton Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela's Home and Established Wealth

Houghton is Johannesburg's most historically significant residential suburb, an established neighbourhood of large homes on generous stands in the northeastern inner suburbs whose most famous former resident — Nelson Mandela — lived at 19 Vilakazis Street after his release from prison in 1990 and at various Houghton addresses until his death in 2013. The suburb's association with Mandela's post-prison life gives it a historical weight beyond its considerable architectural and arboricultural attractions, and the drive along the suburb's canopied roads past the Mandela house provides one of the most charged addresses in South African political geography.

The suburb developed in the early 20th century as Johannesburg's mining and commercial elite sought to distance themselves from the city centre's dust and noise, building substantial mansions in English country-house style on the ridge above the city. The architectural heritage of Houghton includes several significant Herbert Baker buildings — the great South African architect who shaped the domestic architecture of the Witwatersrand's establishment during the first decades of the 20th century — and the suburb's mature garden landscape of oak trees, subtropical planting and established rose gardens represents a version of Johannesburg gardening culture at its most magnificent. The Houghton Golf Club's course winds through the suburb providing an additional green corridor.

The suburb's shopping and dining is centred on the Rosebank and Illovo precincts nearby, but Houghton itself retains several local institutions — the Empire Café, a neighbourhood gathering point of long standing, and the various delis and specialty shops along Louis Botha Avenue — that serve the suburb's residents without requiring the drive to the larger commercial nodes. The suburb's position adjacent to Hillbrow and the inner city's densely settled neighbourhoods creates the kind of proximity between wealth and poverty that characterises Johannesburg's geography with particular directness here, making Houghton a compelling vantage point for understanding the city's unresolved tensions.