Chronicle No. 80 · Places

The Pink Hotel: Cape Town, 1899

A shipping line got tired of landing first-class passengers in a city with nowhere decent to sleep, so it built the hotel itself.

The Union-Castle Line ran the mail ships between Southampton and the Cape, a fortnight each way. By the 1890s it had a problem at the far end: passengers who had paid for a first-class cabin were arriving in Cape Town to find nowhere fit to put them.

So the shipping company built the hotel itself.

The Mount Nelson opened on 6 March 1899 on Orange Street, in gardens below Table Mountain, with electric light and its own grounds — a landing place for its own passengers.

Seven months later the Second Anglo-Boer War began, and the hotel filled with staff officers and war correspondents. Among them was a young Winston Churchill, who thought it a thoroughly comfortable place to find at the end of a sea voyage, and noted how many uniforms were in it.

In 1918, to mark the end of the First World War, the manager had the building painted pink. It has stayed pink for more than a century, which is now the first thing anyone says about it. The avenue of palms at the entrance was planted in 1925 for the visit of the Prince of Wales.

The mail ships are long gone. The hotel they were built to serve is still there, still pink, and still the address in Cape Town.

Lesson: The Mount Nelson was built to fix a shipping company’s last-mile problem. The mail ships stopped a lifetime ago and the hotel is still full — infrastructure outlives the reason for it.