From South Africa’s top luxury hotel to a dilapidated and empty building
Johannesburg’s Carlton Hotel, once the height of luxury in South Africa, has stood empty for over two decades and plans to sell it have fallen flat.
The Carlton Centre, including the hotel, is owned by Transnet and has repeatedly been up for sale with no bidder being successful.
The ports and rail utility is now looking to transform the hotel into affordable housing in the city centre and lease space on the ground floor to Shoprite. Foschini’s Jet and Skipper Bar stores already operate on the ground floor.
Once considered the best hotel in Africa, the Carlton Hotel underwent a meteoric rise and, then, a sharp fall from grace.
Opened in 1972, the hotel was grand in every way. It had over 600 rooms across its 31 storeys, a rooftop pool, several restaurants, and upmarket retail stores.
While this hotel still stands today, it was not the first on the site. The first Carlton was opened in 1902 and was financed by mining magnate Barney Barnato.
Conceived as a huge, world-class luxury hotel with a theatre, it suffered numerous delays due to the Anglo-Boer War and was finally opened without the theatre.
The six-story hotel was the finest in Africa, with a telephone in every room and an early form of air conditioning.
It hosted many celebrities, including King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in 1947. The original hotel was demolished in 1963.
South African Breweries (SAB), flush with cash, saw a chance to replace the old Carlton with a new hotel where the former Castle Brewery had been located on Main and Kruis Street.
The new hotel soon became a collaborative effort between some of the country’s biggest businesses, with Harry Oppenheimer – then chair of Anglo American – wading in.
Oppenheimer encouraged SAB to think even bigger and build a sprawling multi-purpose development based on New York’s famous Rockefeller Center.
Anglo and SAB began buying up land in the area, taking over five and a half city blocks for their new project. Given permission by the city council, the two companies merged their land holdings into one superblock for the centre.
The modern Carlton Centre, built at a cost of R88 million in the 1960s, contained a fifty-story office tower – the tallest in Africa at the time – and a thirty-story luxury hotel.
It would also include a five-story Garlicks department store and a huge public plaza with a two-story underground shopping centre beneath it containing 140 stores.
Anglo American bought out SAB’s share of the project in 1969 before it was completed.

The new Carlton Hotel opened its doors in October 1972 and rapidly became known as the finest hotel in Africa.
In its 25 years of operation, many celebrities occupied its rooms, including Henry Kissinger, French President Francois Mitterrand, Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and Whitney Houston.
The hotel also hosted discussions between politicians and businessmen that were pivotal in the formation of a new South Africa.
In the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert met at the hotel to discuss urban renewal and the creation of a black middle class.
The hotel also hosted numerous meetings between labour unions, mining houses and the government. The most famous of which was in 1987, when over 300,000 mineworkers went on strike.
Union leader at the time, Cyril Ramaphosa, met with mining houses to bring an end to the strike after the companies threatened to fire all the workers.
Towards the end of the 1980s, things began to unravel for the Carlton, with its US operator, Westin, ending its contract to run the hotel due to pressure from the American government to cut ties with Apartheid South Africa.
In 1988, Anglo American began operating the hotel independently.
Anglo chairman Gavin Relly held a meeting in 1990 with 350 South African business leaders and ANC officials to discuss the creation of a post-Apartheid South Africa.
Following this meeting, Nelson Mandela gave a joint press conference with Relly at the hotel, in which Mandela backed off from the ANC’s former pledge to nationalise the country’s mines and redistribute its wealth.
The Carlton would also host vital discussions between political leaders to end the violence erupting across South Africa in the early 1990s.

The Carlton was not able to escape the decline of the surrounding Central Business District (CBD) in the first few years of democratic South Africa.
Companies began moving their headquarters to Sandton and Rosebank to avoid rising crime and the collapse of infrastructure.
Anglo American finally closed the Carlton Hotel in December 1997, with its contents sold to the Protea Hotel at Gold Reef City.
The mining giant explored plans to sell 70% of the hotel to a group of Malaysian and local investors, who planned to spend $120 million to convert the Carlton into a casino. However, this plan failed, and the hotel was closed for good in 1998.
Transnet bought the Carlton Centre, including the hotel, from Anglo in 1999 for R33 million. The office tower and shopping centre remain in use, but the hotel has been empty since 1998.
In 2018, Transnet moved its staff to a building in Midrand to enable the centre to be revamped. Renovations never happened, and it announced it would try to sell the building for R900 million last year.
The sale fell through after bidders were unable to produce evidence of funds to back their bids.
Transnet has a property portfolio worth R13 billion and generated revenue of R1.6 billion in the past financial year. It has begun selling these assets, which are deemed non-core.
The Carlton Centre is the second-biggest asset in Transnet’s property division after the old Durban airport, valued at R2 billion.
After the bids failed, Transnet now plans to refurbish the centre itself, including the hotel. It plans to convert it into affordable housing and lease 3,000m² to Shoprite to open a supermarket and a liquor store.
The Foschini Group’s Jet and Skipper Bar stores — which are already trading there — are likely to remain after negotiations with Transnet.
Inside the Carlton Hotel today






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