The head office in South Africa that is so big it has its own train station and the largest solar carport in Africa
When completed in 1956, Mutual Park in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands was the biggest office block in the Southern Hemisphere.
Within six years, it had already been expanded as Old Mutual’s business boomed, with the office park getting its own train station, Mutual Park, to transport the insurer’s staff.
By the time the office park was built, Old Mutual was over 100 years old, having been founded in 1845 as South Africa’s first mutual life assurance society.
Scottish teacher and newspaper editor John Fairbarn started The Mutual Life Assurance Society of the Cape of Good Hope alongside Saul Solomon.
Starting out with no capital other than the premiums paid by its 166 clients, the company grew rapidly under the motto “A certain friend in uncertain times”.
The increasing integration of South Africa necessitated a name change to The South African Mutual Life Assurance Society just before the Anglo-Boer War.
Old Mutual, as the company would become known, always had its sights on the rest of Africa, opening its Zimbabwe offices in 1927 and a branch in Kenya in 1930.
The name of the game in the first half of the 20th century was survival amid two world wars and significant upheaval in South Africa.
Sticking to its motto and its guns, the company survived and was well-positioned to capitalise on an industrialising South African economy.
Prior to World War II, Old Mutual built the huge Mutual Building in central Cape Town, which was the tallest building in Africa when it opened in 1939.
Meant to convey the insurer’s strength and commitment to Africa, the building still stands today and has been converted into luxury apartments.
However, as the local insurance industry boomed, Old Mutual was faced with a lovely problem for any business – it was growing too quickly for its premises.
This made the Mutual Building in central Cape Town obsolete before it turned 20 years old, with the surging business desperately needing more space.
Mutual Park
While the Mutual Building was meant to convey strength and be visible, its successor was designed to ensure the company would not need another office for decades to come.
The name of the game was space, and Old Mutual wanted lots of it. Pinelands, then towards the outskirts of Cape Town, provided the perfect location.
If the tallest building in Africa was not enough for Old Mutual, then it would build wide and on a scale not yet seen in the Southern Hemisphere.
Post-WWII, insurance boomed in South Africa, and Old Mutual reaped the rewards. The company surpassed one million policyholders in 1954.
Without modern technology, this meant the company needed space for paperwork, storage, and record filing for its members. This created a unique situation where the company needed office space and storage to organise its files.
In the late 1940s, Old Mutual began work on developing Mutual Park in Pinelands. The suburb offered cheap land and the potential for future expansion.
Opened in 1956, the building was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere at the time and transformed a quiet suburb into a major financial hub.
The offices were so large that the government developed Woltemade Station 3 adjacent to the campus to facilitate staff transport.
This stop was later named Mutual Station and remains in use today. It has a concrete footbridge that allows passengers to cross the train tracks directly onto Mutual Park’s campus.
Originally just a stop for office employees, Mutual Station became one of the busiest junctions in the Western Cape Metrorail network as it is located where the Northern Line diverges from the Central Line.
Only a few years after opening, the choice of Pinelands gave Old Mutual the gift of expansion. The insurer made several extensions to its office blocks to accommodate more staff and paperwork.
Later in the 20th century, Old Mutual invested heavily to update the office park to meet the needs of the company in a computer-dominated world.
Old Mutual opened its first telephonic call centre on the campus with a team of 40 people. This rapidly expanded to over 1,000 employees within two years.
The offices were also at the centre of Old Mutual’s demutualisation in 1999, when the company became a publicly listed entity on the London Stock Exchange.
Old Mutual continues to invest in Mutual Park, which is at the heart of the company, despite shiny new offices in Sandton and debates over whether it should be based in the financial hub of Johannesburg.
Today, CEO Jurie Strydom still sits in Mutual Park, which has become a self-sustaining mini-city that features one of the largest solar carports in Africa.
Mutual Park also has its own retail outlets, internal medical clinics, multiple restaurants, and a waste-to-drinking water filtration plant.
This plant is capable of producing between 650,000 and 800,000 litres of water on a daily basis and can supply the entire office complex.
Mutual Park photos
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