Can a city be said to have a colour?
In one sense, the answer is obvious: a space in which millions of people live and work and play can’t be said to be characterised by one particular colour.
And yet, you can have a mental image, an impression, a feeling about a place.
When I worked full-time for a South African media company, there was a period when I spent a lot of time flying backwards and forwards from my home in Cape Town to the company headquarters in Johannesburg.
In my head those two cities have distinct colours.
Cape Town, as photographed in the main picture above. is a particular shade of green against a background of blue. Think the sharp green of grape vine leaves in early summer against a blue mountain backdrop, against a blue sky. Or the green of oak leaves in early spring.
These of course are the colours of colonialism – vines and oak trees having been brought here centuries ago. I’d rather they weren’t the colours in my head, but they were the things that struck me, and stuck in my head, when I first moved here from the Eastern Cape.
The colours of East London, the city that I hailed from? A particular pale yellow of beach sand, and a shimmery blue-grey of river water.
Johannesburg on the other hand is the red of the soil under the pavement – a colour which never ceases to strike me as almost alien.
Durban is a deep tropical green (though my son Jack says he thinks it is beige, a colour derived from driving round the city centre when he was a tween on holiday there with his cousin).
The family was unable to come with a colour for Bloemfontein and Pretoria was divisive – I thought of the grey apartheid buildings from which so much misery was inflicted, but there was also the purple of the jacarandas.
As I was looking for the pictures to go in the newsletter, I was interested to see how easy it was to find photos that resonated with the colours in my head, and I wondered how it is that these sensory impressions are formed. I guess there’s a subconscious filtering of impressions, until you arrive at one that sort-of summarises what you are seeing?
What’s your subconcsious been telling you about your city? What colours are the cities in your head? Reply to the email to let me know!
Main picture: Magda Ehlers, Pexels
Other things I have written
Another brick by the side of the road: life in South Africa – Life in South Africa is not for the faint-hearted. But it is interesting… a list of things you might see as you wander our highways and byways.
The ten circles of South African hell -Being South African has its ups and downs. And a host of everyday irritations and annoyances. This is my list…
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