“The architecture of a city begins when you look upwards” This was quoted to me as being by Gerald Manley Hopkins – although I have never found any evidence of it being by him! Nevertheless, it’s a sentence that encapsulates a world of difference in perspective from common street level.

When one walks around the streets of Johannesburg, made fantastic by the mega-wealthy Rand Lords and the gold rush of over a hundred years ago, to raise your eyes above the bustling streets – crowded with hawkers selling bargain basement cheap vegetables, and hooting taxis – is to experience a sudden epiphany. There is a hidden city within this city, just waiting to be developed and explored. It’s just a magic carpet ride away.
So let me take you up to the rooftops of Johannesburg. Rooftops which are not yet the equal of their brothers and sisters in other cities, such as New York where penthouses, pools and premium restaurants jostle for prime position, or Melbourne where cool rooftop bars enjoy panaramic vistas, or even the old walled city of Jersusalem, but rooftops which hold so much potential. Spaces are springing up everywhere, blank canvases on which to create magic and enjoy new generation urban living, and sometimes ugly looking skyscrapers are the perfect receptacle for this.
The greening of rooftops in many major cities has enjoyed much column space over recent years, and everywhere there are exciting things to do on a rooftop, from creating wind turbines or solar power, to growing organic vegetables, to beekeeping, to cool restaurants and bars and penthouse poolsides. Skyscrapers have become the new urban exploration – sound decreases the further up one goes, the views are panoramic, urban planning suddenly makes complete sense and even when the roofs break out in a weekend rash of multi-coloured squares of washing, whipped fiercely by the wind, or are densely populated by colonies of satellite dishes, this is the inspiration for a photographer’s lens, rather than an eyesore. These are the places where top companies’s helipads are located, where mothers soap their unwilling children thoroughly from head to toe using a plastic bucket, where potplants thrive, where cool sounds drift across the rooftops, where you can be as voyeuristic or private as you wish.
Johannesburg has some of the most spectacular sunsets in the world, and dizzying views from 50 storey high buildings truly are the “Top of Africa”. We may not have a mountain or be able to bungee jump off our buildings (just yet), but you can get the best views in and of the city from the following “rooftop players” which allow for an inner-city engagement –