In the early 1970s, the Capetonians wanted more extensive use of the city's historic harbour area, laid in the 1860s when Prince Alfred (Victoria's second son) symbolically tipped the first load of stone into the sea to start off construction on the port which was to bear his name -- it wasn't long before the expansion of trade routes to the East had transformed the city and discovery of gold and diamonds meant that the first section of harbour, the Alfred Basin, needed to be extended, and the Victoria Basin was added on by 1920.
The area is still notable for its outstanding heritage buildings, retaining some of the charm of its Victorian industrial architecture and giving you a feel for the scale of a harbour built for sail and the early days of steam travel.
By the 1970s, though, cargo handling and transportation alongside the re-opening of the Suez Canal and South Africa's apartheid pariah status caused a sharp downturn in the V&A's fortunes, and instead, its owners turned it into a leisure site with dozens of restaurants (some have bars for sipping outside on deck), bars, a world-class aquarium, three cinemas (including an IMAX), conferences facilities, hotels, shops; a playground of shining chrome and smiling, busy visitors. However, look carefully and you'll see there remain a few of the older signs of yesteryear...
Near to the site of the original Bertie's Landing restaurant is the Victorian Port Captain's Office (1882) with its Gothic-style Clock Tower; always an icon of the old docks, they were reworked around it so it remains a focal point in the redesigned waterfront. Look out for the second-floor mirror room, which allowed the Captain a view of all harbourside goings-on, and the ground-floor "tide-gauge." Captain Robert Wauchope's Time Ball Tower (1894), next to the Dock House where the Harbour Engineer lived, was a signalling device in which a ball dropped at a set time so that ships' masters could verify the accuracy of on-board chronometers. Next to it is the century-old, bedraggled Dragon Tree (dracaeno draco), believed to result from a seed dropped by a visitor from the Canary Islands -- it suffered badly in 2001 storms but seems to be recovering slowly.
Also next door to the red-roofed Clock Tower is the Robben Island Exhibition and Information Centre, where you buy tickets for embarkation on the catamaran for Robben Island guided tours (3.5 hrs; 150Rpp -- see entry above). (At present (Dec. 2003), there's an exhibition of Nelson Mandela's art from his Robben Island days).
Cape fur seals play In the dock waters. "Robben" means "seals" in Dutch - the island was named after them, as they often hung, and still hang, around the area, as a source of food lives there - jackass penguins! They idle around, often in pairs, performing for their own amusement -- occasionally, boatloads of oarsmen pass round the harbour and the seals tag along...