Cape Town Station gets facelift as work begins at last on station hotel, office complex
Cape Town - If you have been wondering what is going on behind the barricades at the Cape Town Station forecourt, adjacent to Adderley Street, the Mother City is getting another facelift.
Work has at last begun on the long-awaited facelift for Cape Town Station, more than six years after Prasa submitted a rezoning application to allow for the development of a 120-room hotel, office and retail complex on part of the forecourt of the public transport exchange area.
Earth-moving bulldozers have now moved on to the barricaded construction site and have begun digging up the concrete in the forecourt area.
“The Spatial Planning Environment and Land Use Management (Spelum) committee made this decision and the final notification was issued in February 2017 after the conclusion of the appeals process,” said the City in a statement.
The rezoning application was originally submitted to the City in 2015, but was delayed because of the finalisation of a site development plan for more than 6 000m² of residual retail space as a result of the World Cup upgrades.
When the project was first announced, Prasa’s Corporate Real Estate Solutions (Prasa Cres) invited development partners to undertake and manage the redevelopment of portions of Cape Town Station.
On Wednesday Prasa Cres was unable to respond to queries about the cost of the project or how long the construction would take before the story was published.
However, at the time the proposal was before the City, Prasa Cres had invited a consortium of three property developers to submit building plans for the development which was to provide for over 27 000m² of office space and 17 866m² of retail area, 175 parking bays, and a 3 000m² medium-range business hotel over three levels.
The development was not expected to exceed 54m in height.
This is the third major upgrade the forecourt has undergone since the R408 million overhaul of the station for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.
There was also the remodelling of the Adderley and Strand Street concourses, which were completed in 2011 and the R126m redevelopment of the Parade concourse in 2016.
mwangi.githahu@inl.co.za