This weekend a fire gutted one of the oldest buildings in the Cape Town CBD, despite the heroic efforts of the fire fighting team who sped to the scene at 10h30 on Saturday morning.
They finally brought the blaze under control shortly before 17h00 – over 6 hours' of desperate firefighting later.
Thankfully no-one was hurt or killed in the fire. However, the damage to this late Victorian neo-classical building, which is (according to the Weekend Argus) “the last surviving example of industrial architecture in the heart of the CBD”, is a great loss for the city.
A spokesperson for the fire department said that everything inside the building was burnt.
The 120-year old Touchstone building on Bree Street is a well-known city edifice which was erected in the1890s by Dutch settlers for the purpose of storing wool, says Michael Berk of Berk Property Holdings which owns the building.
Today the building houses offices and shops, including the small takeaway shop where the blaze is said to have originated. At this stage it is thought that a fire in the deep-fryers quickly travelled up a flue to the upper floors and thus allowed the blaze to spread through the building – with its wooden floors – like, well, wildfire.
However a full investigation into the cause of the original fire is underway.
Liz Westby-Nunn (Portfolio CEO) was in the vicinity and took these dramatic photos of the Townsend fire.
For a stunning series of black and white images documenting the fire check out this set on flickr, by local photographer Anthony Koeslag.