Muizenberg Beach Huts

When Victorian propriety demanded that ladies change into chin-to-ankle bathing wear out of public view, wheeled bathing machines rolled into the sea at beaches worldwide. After mixed bathing became legal in 1901, many lost their wheels and settled permanently on the sand. At Muizenberg, the municipality built 174 regulated bathing boxes in 1929, painted in regulation colors and positioned along the high-water mark. Nearly a century later, these same huts faced removal over safety concerns and criminal activity, until locals rallied to save them, proving that some beach traditions are worth fighting for.

That fight isn’t quite over. In 2017, reports of prostitution and muggings inside the huts prompted talk of tearing them down, and a community petition kept them standing. As of early 2026, they’re coming down again, this time deliberately, as part of a promenade upgrade project. The city has promised to rebuild them to the original design, colors, and patterns once the work is finished, so the huts aren’t disappearing so much as taking a scheduled break from the beach they’ve occupied for nearly a hundred years.

The site has seen bigger disruptions than a construction project. In 1795, a British fleet fired roughly 800 cannonballs at Dutch defenses on this same stretch of coast in a battle that lasted about thirty minutes and ended with Britain’s first occupation of the Cape Colony. It set the terms for the next century of who ruled here, and the language most of South Africa would come to speak. The beach huts, by comparison, have had it easy: theirs is a fight against neglect and bureaucracy, not artillery, and so far it’s one they keep winning.