Estate Living Magazine Precinct Living - Issue 33 | Page 24

uMhlanga
A NEW HORIZON
Way back in 1895
uMhlanga was a quiet
seaside spot where the
workers at the nearby
sugar mill would come
to relax; some would
go fishing, others
would just laze on
the beach or pop to a
nearby shop.
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Fast forward a century and you have
a bustling village with hotels, resorts,
restaurants and numerous residents. One
might have thought that this was as good
as it would get for the village of uMhlanga,
but 23 years on development is happening
thick and fast.
The site of what was once a humble cottage
of wood and iron is now the iconic Oyster
Box Hotel, and the Umhlanga Sands stands
where the Victoria Hotel once stood – a hotel
that in 1935 hosted famous Irish playwright
George Bernard Shaw, among others.
Beyond the village, the fields of sugar cane
interspersed with coastal forest remained
until the 1980s when development started
to expand inland, eventually reaching
up to the ridge when, in 1995, Tongaat
Hulett began transforming former sugar-
cane fields into mixed-use developments.
The uMhlanga Ridge development has
become one of South Africa’s fastest-
growing development nodes, bringing
a variety of elements together to create
an environment that offers a multitude of
business, shopping, entertainment and
accommodation options.
The speed of this development was
hastened in 2010 by the construction of the
new King Shaka International Airport (KSIA)
at La Mercy, and the construction of a
number of new hotels in anticipation of the
2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup™. With the
densification of the Ridge, as it’s commonly
referred to, existing road infrastructure
became horribly inefficient – in particular