THE URBAN TRAIL
I was once asked by a geography school teacher to assist with a short handbook for his students to encourage them to look at the built environment with fresh eyes. I got into this with enthusiasm. But he moved on to a new career and had quite a lot of material.
The more I got into the subject, the more enjoyed it and it began to grow. I teamed up with Gill Vernon who was the historian at the museum and we produced a small booklet.
Subjects of great interest though have no bounds (as you may have noticed with this website) and it continued to grow. I had the local Border Kei Institute of Architects endorse it (I was the heritage chairman after all). And the rest, as they say, is history.
These were the days before desk top publishing - or even typing and compilation on a computer. Everything was typed on a typewriter. Glynis Heger typed it for me and I did all the sketches by hand (using drafting pens on tracing paper over photos). There were only a few historic photos used and local professional photographer, Rob Pollock assisted with these. Large text was done using Letraset, a popular rub-on method of the time. The whole was proof read several times, but once published we kept finding typos.
The whole was copied and printed by a company in Ciskei specialising in producing school books in Xhosa. Seeing it in production was intriguing - all the pages in batches and facing every which way until cut and bound.
It was only while all this was going on that desktop publishing was becoming known in East London and we also got our first computers. Too late though for this book.
