A year ago today, we had the Joburg Property Company’s The Green Belt sale scare, our Koppies included. This month we watched a stretch of it burn-baby-burn while residents fought another fire! Welcome to Melville Untold: it’s controlled burns on the koppies, but the heat is in the streets.

In this week’s newsletter,

by Aubrey Moloto, Caroline Koma and Lethabo Maloma

Some people find their thing late. Debbie found hers before she could walk. She grew up in Sydenham on a plot her family ran like a farmyard, because her father, in her words, was “an absolute animal freak.” Dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, hamsters, tortoises. “You name it, we had it.” It seems that the woman now moving Raw Pet Food by the ton was always going to end up near a food bowl. It just took a sick dog in Cape Town to guide her.

The Dog Two Weeks From Goodbye

That dog belonged to Debbie's sister, a golden Bullmastiff with skin allergies so bad that vet after vet ran out of answers. Eventually one said the kindest thing left was to put him down. Her sister wasn't having it. "Number one, my love, number two, a pedigree dog. I'm not putting him down. There's got to be a solution." She found one: an American vet who fed 100 per cent raw, a holistic vet in the Cape and a pet nutritionist who built the dog a recipe. "Two weeks, the allergy started going. Six weeks, it was like there was never a problem." When she took him back, the first vet just stared. "What have you done? This is a miracle."

Five Rand A Packet And A Garage Door

The miracle became a business. Debbie’s sister started making the food for other dogs, then selling it, and thirty years on she’s still at it. When Joburg customers came asking, she rang Debbie. Would she sell it up north? Debbie had her hands full with her own work, so she agreed to help, nothing more. One freezer, half a ton a month, five rand a packet. It went into her husband’s workshop, where anything without a home got dumped. “This was the dumping room. I served my customers through the garage door. It was embarrassing.” She wouldn’t even let people in, just passed the packets through the gap. A freezer took six weeks to clear. Nobody would have called it a business yet. Then the world shut.

A Business Born In A Hazmat Suit

When Covid hit, Debbie had a freezer full of food, an expiry date creeping closer, and a country where deliveries had stopped dead. So she got herself declared essential, because dogs still have to eat, and went out to feed them. “I was in this suit, driving my car, putting food on the pavement.” Mask, gloves, the lot. A folding supplier in Northcliff had freezers going spare, so she took them and went from one to three overnight. That was when she stopped helping her sister and phoned to say she was buying the stock outright. So while some businesses suffered bitterly, others bloomed. Who would have thunk it?

Feed My Food, I’ll Pay Your Vet Bill

That conviction comes with a headline. “Come and feed my food. I will pay your next vet bill.” She says it straight, because her numbers have gone slightly mad. She started at 380 kilograms over six weeks. She’s now close to two and a half tons a month across sixteen freezers, with daily orders to Durban, the Free State and as far as Polokwane. A book called The Forever Dog, by the American vet Karen Becker, became “my little Bible,” and then Becker herself spotted Debbie’s website and emailed about working together. “Little old me? I’m learning from you.” The goal now is five tons a month inside two years. “I never in my wildest dreams thought this would develop into what it has.”

New to raw feeding and want to read around it first? Cornell’s Riney Canine Health Centre has a plain-English, evidence-based rundown of what the research does and doesn’t show, including the food-safety side worth ten minutes before you switch your dog’s diet, and worth a chat with your own vet.

Where Your Blankets Come In

Why the blankies, in the coldest stretch of the year? Well, Debbie runs a blanket drive, and this winter the deli is the drop-off. She started it a few winters back for a simple reason.

“These havens for dogs are always desperate for help. I can’t give financially, but I can help in other ways.”

One cold snap, she asked her street, blankets piled up so much that neighbours had to help load her car for the shelters. One rule: newer blankets only, so grab one at Pep or the Crazy Store on the way if yours is too tattered. Bring it to Raw Pet Food Deli, or drop us a pin if you’re in Mellies and we’ll pick it up! Stock up on food and treats while you’re there, and if you’ve adopted a rescue, tell her why you’re giving. “The reward is not for you, the reward is for the dog you’re giving to.” It runs alongside our own Pet Winter Swag push, so call this the blanket-drive edition.

I Love Melville

We’re always close by asking what someone loves about this place and the moment they can’t shake, and Debbie didn’t have to think hard. Her Melville is the 90s one, when it was the place to eat and the place to be after dark. “Such a vibe.” She followed South African music through it, watching Louis Mhlanga and Vusi Mahlasela at The Bassline on 7th Street every Wednesday. Her most memorable moment is a small one. She used to arrive on crutches, and the Bassline kept a stool by her seat so she could put her foot up. 

“It didn’t matter who you were, didn’t matter where you came from. You were just part of the community that was there.” Thirty years and two and a half tons later, that’s still the “vibe” running the whole operation. It’s called Melville MAGIC.

Pop into Raw Pet Food Deli, follow Raw Pet Food Deli, leave a Google review, and drop off a blanket while the cold’s still here.

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For more updates as the week goes on, visit our Instagram page @snapson7th or our Melville Pulse event calendar

The Melville Art Mile is back on Thursday 6 August, and for Women’s Month we’ll be giving imbokodo their flowers by running it as “Ladies First”, a whole edition built around the women shaping Joburg’s art scene. Same first-Thursday rhythm as always: galleries, studios, restaurants, and pop-up shows. Businesses open late along the strip, and there’s a shuttle ferrying you between the further-flung venues.

Three ways in. A free wristband to wander the Mile at your own pace, a R150 wristband for the self-guided route with the shuttle and the night markets, or the R450 VIP tier for the guided walk with yours truly, refreshments and behind-the-scenes access. Tickets are live on Quicket and the official MAM page.

The face of this month's poster is Robyn Zanine, a visual artist who paints, illustrates, animates and works with augmented reality. Born in Durban, raised in Joburg, she spent years in Hong Kong before coming home to Mzansi, and that round trip is "impulsively" splayed all over the work. "My artistic career really started in Hong Kong, and it came from a space of feeling displaced and questioning my identity more than ever," she says. The faces she paints, bright and layered and unmistakably afrocentric, began as doodles in the corners of her notebooks when she was homesick, "features that reminded me of family."

Her method is an act of controlled chaos: a smooth, blended base, then angular shapes and sharp corners layered on top, colour piled on colour. The themes are the soft and vulnerable. Identity, self-love, overcoming personal challenges, "topics that many people can resonate with."

Right now she's pouring all of it into Chatter, her first solo show in SA, an exploration of adaptability and how much of ourselves we keep when a place asks us to change. "From the frame to the stretching of the canvas, the priming, to the actual artwork, it's all me," she says, and she means it as a first on both counts, technical and personal. Chatter opened at Victoria Yards, 16 Viljoen Street, Lorentsville, last night, 29 July and runs to 12 August. She'll be there every day.

She found the Mile the way most people do. "I first came across the Melville Art Mile on Instagram and knew I had to experience it for myself. So I visited, and I had the best time." A stint with the Joburg Artist Market at 27 Boxes led to an invitation to exhibit, and this is her second Mile. "It really has been that sense of community. It's nice to feel like I'm part of something." Her advice to anyone still on the fence: "If you like art, or you're just interested in what the Joburg scene has to offer, Melville is definitely the place to be!"

A few of the women-led highlights on the night:

All that and so much more. Tune in to next week’s newsletter for the full 6 August programme.

Grab your wristband on Quicket for the map, come hungry and curious, and bring someone who swears they don’t like galleries. Melville tends to change people’s minds!

Gallery 1903 opens Looking Up. Again. on Thursday 30 July at 6pm, an exhibition of Nick Walsh’s charcoal drawings of the grand old architecture of downtown Joburg, opened by architect and heritage consultant Brian McKechnie. It runs until 25 August. If you’ve ever walked through town with your head tilted back, this one’s for you.

Having just spent the whole Digest on the dog side of the pet world, no self-respecting Melville cat is going to let that slide so easily. So today’s Tail End belongs to them.

There’s a long-term Melville/Westdene resident who’s been feeding, monitoring and handling vet care for the feral cat colony just outside Wits for years; she’s the unsung hero the colony never knew it needed. Charney Van Aardt Giovanelli sources food and vet care at cost from Richmond Vet, and funds a good chunk of it through her handmade keychain and earring business, Fluffy n Plushy, subsidised by pet and house-sitting.

Last night, Wednesday 29 July, William Kentridge, known for his charcoal drawings, animated films and opera productions from here to Venice, brought two new books to Love Books at the Bamboo Centre. And Melville, being Melville, sold the whole thing out. Yup, The RSVP list closed a long time ago and that ship has sailed!

For anyone who needs the 4-1-1: he’s the artist your Grade 10 art teacher probably wouldn’t stop talking about, except this time she was probably right. For residents who remember Melville when trams still ran on 7th Street, yes, that Kentridge, the Wits-trained one whose work was at Documenta and the Venice Biennale and just about everywhere in between.

Love Books has been on a roll since the resurgence, and it keeps growing from strength to strength. Just a few weeks ago, they had Dan Cordor amongst many other mega literature/academia stars that we're probably not smart enough to know about! A feature story is long overdue.

Great Dane at 8 Main Road gets its first mention in a while. Since reopening in Melville, the much-loved Joburg venue has quietly been rebuilding, with a steady calendar of live music, DJs and club nights, bringing the energy that made it a favourite in Braam to a new home on Main Road. 

It also feels like another piece of the rejuvenation of Main Road, with the brilliant volunteer-led clean-up and work by Lew Geffen, (more on that soon) new venues, familiar names and more reasons to wander beyond 7th Street. It's spreading. Just one less hair salon, please.

Ever driven all the way to Campus Square just for one pack of screws? Yeah. That's exactly why Buildora Hardware is here.  

This week, the doors swung open at 12 7th Street. Manager Naeer Shamim says that they’re here because his father, the owner, and he “saw a lack of hardware stores, or just appliance stores, in the surrounding areas, especially in the residential areas.” A proper hardware store on the strip? We haven’t had that since the 80s!

This is a family operation with a track record in the industry. His father launched Sam’s Hardware in Norwood back in 2004. Now that store is folding under the same name, so both Norwood and Melville trade as Buildora. Other branches operate in Joburg and Cape Town under different names, but each one stands on its own, no franchise strings attached. 

Behind the counter you’ll find managers Shaun and Sharif plus two floor staff ready to help. Suppliers keep sending stock in, and the plan is simple: “there’s nothing that we don’t offer.” The real game changer for anyone without a bakkie is the delivery. “If a customer needs, for example, a heavier appliance and maybe they can’t transport it themselves, we do deliver.”

Two proper reasons to swing by this week? You can grab 5% off your total until Sunday, and yes, even if it's just one screwdriver or ten bags of cement. Every purchase will also drop you into a raffle running until 12 August.  I don't know about you, but I think that sure beats a road runner.

They’re open Monday to Saturday, 08:00 to 20:00, and Sunday 08:00 to 15:00. Memorise that 8 PM close time. Next time something breaks at half past six on a Tuesday, you’ll thank yourself.

Die Pienk Kerk is becoming more than a restaurant, and August is making that point for us. The restored 1903 pink chapel has quietly turned into one of Melville’s most interesting little performance venues, mixing theatre, comedy, music and good food under one very pink roof. Sold-out cabarets and packed music nights have become the norm rather than the exception.

The August programme keeps the momentum going:

It says something about the neighbourhood that a former church now runs a programme that could rival venues with much bigger budgets. Melville has always loved a good reinvention, and Die Pienk Kerk is becoming one of its best. If the last few months are anything to go by, don’t leave bookings until the last minute. Get your diary out. Or your phone calendar. We don’t judge.

Melville business owners: Check out our website to find out about our affordable advertising packages.

Here is the kind of story that reminds you what Melville Magic is.

It’s Monday evening, 20 July, about half past five, evening. It’s golden hour. A fire breaks, spilling out onto the pavement at Cnr. 5th and 8th Street, just west of 9th. The Melville Security Initiative and Beagle Watch got there blitz vinnig. What Danny found was worse than reported: flames on the ground like brimstone overhead engulfing a tree, spreading relentlessly.

He called for firefighters, but the street turned up.

A heaving 5th Avenue resident rushed in and emptied his own extinguisher, dousing most of the flames on the ground. Danny kept up the assault, emptying a second. The flames on the manhole cover kept bursting back to life, so it was peeled back with garden tools and drenched with a hose. After what probably seemed like an eternity (in an oven) Fire Ops descended upon the scene, armed with blasting hoses and killed off the dying embers glowing in the trees.

The fire came within roughly ten metres of the house.

Nobody was hurt, and the damage stopped at the plants. It also puts one resident’s message in the group afterwards in context. “Huge thanks to Danny and neighbours for saving our house!!”

Our neighbourhood superhero does it again. Public service announcement from Danny: “Fire should always be treated seriously as it can quickly flare up with fuel and oxygen.”

Water is tight across the suburb right now, and that brings us to the next point. While an argument about tank inlets was still running in the chat, a resident stopped to ask, without a hint of irony, whether anyone would mind if water was used to fight the fire.

Nobody did.

A suburb short on water, using what little it had, on each other, without a second thought. That’s our hood for you, and honestly, that’s Melville Magic.

Danny gave us these, and they might be the most useful thing in this issue.

He also recommends following City of Joburg EMS and Fire Ops on social media, which he rates as the soundest information going.

Quick, straight update for anyone still without taps. Issue 87 flagged the Rand Water Phase 2 shutdown for Friday 17 July. What followed was a multi-day outage that has run for nearly a fortnight. If Melville had a mascot this month, it would be a bucket.

From the councillors’ joint update: the Commando System is recovering, with supply reaching more households overnight, though some areas that had come back have gone off again. Two steps forward, one step back. Johannesburg Water reports no known airlocks or closed valves, and will investigate both if supply doesn’t return where expected. Full system recovery was put at 7 to 12 days after the 17 July maintenance, which lands us at roughly 24 to 29 July. That window closed yesterday.

The councillors, Cllr Nicolene Jonker, Cllr Genevieve Sherman, Cllr Kyle Jacobs and Cllr Chantelle Fourie-Shawe, have been pushing Johannesburg Water for tankers to all affected areas, and residents were asked, where possible, not to refill JoJo tanks and backup storage while the system recovers.

There’s a bigger number behind all of this that explains the slowness better than anything else. Johannesburg Water told the councillors its system needs roughly 2,500 cubic metres to run properly and has been receiving about 2,300, because Rand Water’s Meredale Reservoir has been sitting critically low. You can’t push water uphill that isn’t there.

This one landed a day or so ago, and it’s worth reading in full. The Daily Maverick, working with the non-profit newsroom Our City News, reports that the City of Johannesburg took R3.4-billion out of Johannesburg Water’s bank account on the last day of June, leaving the entity with a balance of zero. The money only started coming back on 9 July. The sweep left Johannesburg Water unable to settle R1.8-billion owed to creditors, and most of its projects and operational contracts were suspended, because there was nothing to pay contractors with.

Now the part that is about us specifically. The reservoir named in that report as responsible for the water problems in Melville, Emmarentia, Greenside and Parktown West is Hursthill 2. It has been leaking for years. It was supposed to be repaired by April. The work is 20% done, with an official completion estimate of December that the report calls unlikely, given there’s no money to pay anyone.

That’s the same Hursthill 2 that Jonathan Thompson’s street survey has been measured off all month. So when your road has been dry since Thursday, and the explanation you get is airlocks and JoJo tanks, the fuller answer is a reservoir that’s been leaking for years, on a repair job that stopped because the utility’s account was emptied.

A few more numbers from the same report, for scale: Johannesburg Water is losing 49% of the water it buys from Rand Water, and the pipe burst rate has climbed to an average of 4,108 a month, up from 2,960 the previous financial year.

The water justice group WaterCAN is pushing for the money back. “The City must stop treating Johannesburg Water as a cash cow and return the approximately R6-billion it owes the entity,” says its executive director, Dr Ferrial Adam. “Without that, ringfencing is just a slogan, not a solution.” The City had not responded to the Daily Maverick by publication.

On the ground, the picture is uneven: several streets, largely higher-lying, went five days or more with nothing; others saw a trickle in the small hours and a handful held with pressure up and down. We’ve had water for over a week now!

What helps right now: store water when it comes, check on neighbours who can’t lug buckets, and keep reporting outages through official channels so the councillors have the data to keep pushing for tankers.

CREASS Clean-Up Day. A community clean-up day is in the works through CREASS. The date hasn’t been set, but we’ll share it the moment it does. Melville usually shows up when there’s a chance to make the neighbourhood look a little better. Do the right thing.

Two election dates, and some actual work going. Local government elections are set for Wednesday 4 November, which also means a public holiday. Before that, the last in-person voter registration weekend is this Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 August, so if you’ve moved (and plenty of people in this suburb have), that’s your window to fix your address. Check your registration here.

And the useful bit: the IEC is filling more than 600 vacancies nationwide ahead of the vote, with preference going to unemployed youth. Voting officers, presiding officers, queue walkers, logistics and admin, all temporary, all with training beforehand.

You need to be a South African citizen over 18 with a valid ID, able to read and write in English, living in and speaking the local language of your voting district, registered to vote there, and without a political affiliation that would compromise impartiality.

Some senior roles want a tertiary qualification. Applications close Monday 31 August, through the IEC jobs portal. If you know a matriculant or a graduate at a loose end, forward them this paragraph.

Smoke came off the ridge a few times this month, and it aint signals! The question going around was whether the committee had lit it on purpose. Negative.

“There was a fire. It was not set deliberately,” says David Dickinson of the Melville Koppies Committee. It burned through most of Koppies Central and Koppies East, and it was not a controlled burn.

Which raises a fair question, because we all use the phrase loosely. A controlled burn happens for two reasons. The first is firebreaks: “we use fire to break up the extent of the grassland so that when a fire does break out, it only burns a certain portion.” The second is ecological. “In the natural ecosystem of the veld, there should be occasional fires,” David says. “If there aren’t fires for a long period of time, this restricts the growth of new plants.” Done properly, it leaves “a patchwork of burnt and unburnt sections”, not a clean sweep.

Get involved with the Melville Koppies: ([email protected], 066 571 9539).

Not every story on the Koppies comes with a ribbon-cutting. Behind the scenes, the volunteers are still tackling the less glamorous jobs that keep this green space alive: winter maintenance, repairs to the sinkhole, restoring damaged fencing, protecting the archaeological cave and progressing the Blue Plaque heritage project. It’s steady work, and most of it happens long before anyone notices the results.

If you’d like to lend a hand, join a volunteer work party, make a donation, or add Friends of Melville Koppies as one of the beneficiaries on your MySchool MyVillage MyPlanet card.

Our favourite blog, 2Summers.net is back on the Melville beat, and both are worth your coffee break: A Staycation at Melville Mansions, which reads our pink flamingo like a destination, and Joburg Thrifting Winter 2026.

Heather Mason lived here for eleven years, so when she writes the place up as somewhere to go, that’s the whole 7th Street revival story in one blog post.

We can’t wait for her Melville130 portal contributions!

Thank you for reading issue 88 of Melville Untold. If any of that made your week a little warmer, here’s how to keep the flames burning: buy us a coffee.

Did we miss something? Reply, fill us in. And if you know someone who loves Mellies, forward this mail to them.

‘til next week, Melville,

Stay warm, stay watchful, stay wonderful.

Hei Hei ✌️