The natural thing to do, once I got
the big heavy book of Bulawayo sketches back to Dubai, was to get into Google
street-view and see how the buildings are holding up.
Bit of a surprise to discover that street view doesn’t
cover Bulawayo. There are photos that you can get to pop up but no street view
and no meshed 3d. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I moved to Zimbabwe
in 1981. It was a bit like traveling back in time. Kitchen sinks were still
using lead traps for the waste outlets 😳
That was the standard item available in builders hardware merchants. Plastic
had yet to penetrate the market.
No street view, but I found Bulawayo Club, and the
Rhodes statue, plus a few other reference images to help me resuscitate the
research into Zimbabwe architecture that I began 3 or 4 decades ago.
No promises about how far I will go with this, but it
has my attention for the moment, and will probably continue to pop up from time
to time, long after it has shifted from centre…