1/10 I’m sleepless with no hope of gaining any so I will do a quick social history of one of my favorite streets in Harare, the street called Rotten Row that is now supposed to be called Gamal Nasser Road. The name comes from French: Rotten Row is a corruption of Route de Roi.

2/10 This is because our Rotten Row is named after Rotten Row in London, established in 1690 to allow the double monarchs William and Mary to connect quickly across Hyde Park between two Palaces, Kensington and St James’s, hence it was called Route de Roi or “the King’s road”.

3/10 Over time Route de Roi became Rotten Row and it is now the only equestrian promenade in London. I had the pleasure of writing about Hyde Park and Rotten Row for the FT Life and Arts section back in 2015, as it’s one of my favorite places to sit and watch people and horses.

4/10 Our band of marauders, the Pioneer Column, made Rotten Row a central highway. From Jameson it went past the kopje all the way through Mbare, and became a busy buzzing highway that became one of the main arteries into the city. I love this typo by the way: Rotten Row St.

5/10 An ambitious “Civic Centre” was planned at its top end, with a library, a natural history museum and a magistrate’s court. These are three of Harare’s most beautiful and most iconic buildings.

6/10 I’m especially fond of the Harare City Library, built in 1962, designed by architects Montgomery and Oldfield who in 1964 won a RIBA bronze medal for the “most impressive building in the Commonwealth.” It’s why it took so much money to restore it, it’s a protected building.

7/10 But I also love tne Magistrates Court, an unusual hexagon-shaped building that recreates a human hive and seems inspired by the great conical tower at Great Zimbabwe and that, on a larger, grander scale, was replicated in the Reserve Bank Building many years later.

8/10 Another beauty further down is Ranche House, by the architect J Cope Christie whose work I love so much I made him the designer of the house in THE BOOK OF MEMORY. It was sold by Frank Johnson to Sir Raleigh and Lady Grey, famous for dressing their servants in full livery!

9/10 I’ll do a thread one day on James Cope-Christie, head and shoulders the architect who stamped his mark on Salisbury, with such lovely graceful houses and buildings. The surviving ones are (in theory) protected monuments, which can be changed internally but not externally.

10/10 So that’s it, Rotten Row’s one of my favorite streets. I also love Stanley Ave, now Jason Moyo, and was once asked to join a really ambitious project to make it Harare’s flagship street : Zim’s biggest property owners are all represented there. One day, one day. One day.