The red clock tower has stood at the entrance to the Alfred Basin since 1882. Its original clock (made in Edinburgh, UK) still runs. Come for the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island, harbour-facing restaurants and the crossing into the Silo District. Stay because it keeps pulling you back.

A working dry dock where boats are repaired. A million-and-a-half litres of seawater, not to mention all the extraordinary marine creatures, in the Two Oceans Aquarium. Over 150 independent makers, designers and traders in the Watershed next door, plus a co-working space where the harbour is the view from your desk at Workshop17 Watershed. The Dry Dock District is anything but dry.

Granger Bay is the neighbourhood’s next chapter. A major development is underway here that will bring thousands of new homes, jobs and a reimagined stretch of waterfront to the water’s edge.

The oldest buildings here date to 1870. The old Breakwater Prison became the UCT Graduate School of Business in 1992, its prisoners’ cells converted into seminar rooms.

The newest is The Ridge, home to Deloitte. It was built with a timber façade, water-cooled floors and 5.5 tonnes of single-use plastic stuffed into eco-bricks and locked into its foundations. Across the courtyard, a vegetable garden feeds urban food programmes that have been running since 2020.

Since 1880, people have been crossing from the Pierhead to the other side of the Cut, first by penny ferry, now by the swing bridge. The Port Captain’s Building has watched over it all since 1904, and working vessels still move in and out of the basin all day. Some corners of this neighbourhood have been in use for over 160 years.

Someone had a decommissioned grain silo and an idea. Four years later, Zeitz MOCAA opened as the world’s largest museum of contemporary African art. The Silo District grew up around it, including six buildings, blue-chip offices, two hotels, galleries, restaurants, and a grain silo that is now one of the most photographed buildings on the continent.

Before the Canal District existed, the V&A had edges marking where the neighbourhood stopped, and the city began. This is what dissolved them. Battery Park, Waterway House, Signal View, and Dock Road Junction now form a precinct that connects the waterfront to the city rather than sitting apart from it.

South Arm Road begins where the Silo circle ends and runs all the way to the Transnet building. This working stretch of harbour, where major fishing fleets berth and commercial vessels come and go, is perhaps the V&A Waterfront at its most unfiltered: cranes, boats, the smell of salt and diesel and, at the far end, the open ocean.