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Cape Town has grown as a city in a way that few others in the world have. Take a good look at the street names. Strand and Waterkant streets (meaning "beach" and "waterside," respectively) are now far from the sea. However, when they were named, they were right on the beach. An enormous program of dumping rubble into the ocean extended the city by a good few square miles (thanks to the Dutch obsession with reclaiming land from the sea). Almost all the city on the seaward side of Strand and Waterkant is part of the reclaimed area of the city known as the Foreshore. If you look at old paintings of the city, you will see that originally waves lapped at the very walls of the castle, now more than half a mile from the ocean.
The center of Cape Town's art and antiques business, this pleasant block of Church Street is a pedestrian mall filled with art galleries, antiques dealers, small cafés, and a few excellent boutiques. Among the art galleries worth visiting are
Note that Church Street is (somewhat confusingly) not located directly off of Church Square and Groote Kerk (the church for which the street is named), but across Adderley Street.
This pedestrian-only promenade stretches about five blocks from St. George's Cathedral through the city center (passing Greenmarket Square) to the financial district. Shops and cafés line the mall, and street vendors sell everything from T-shirts to African arts and crafts. Street performers and dancers gather daily to entertain crowds of locals and visitors, who rub shoulders on their way to and from work or while sightseeing. The very good "Earthfair" food market is held on the Cathedral end of the mall every Thursday from 11 to 3.
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