Say goodbye to Muizenberg's iconic beach huts, they're coming down next week!

If a photo of Muizenberg beach is on your bucket list – and let's be honest, those candy-striped huts have graced thousands of Instagram feeds - you have a limited time to capture them as they've existed for nearly a century. 

As part of the major Muizenberg beachfront redevelopment, the City of Cape Town has confirmed that the four beach huts on the western side of the beachfront will be dismantled and removed as early as next week. The four huts on the eastern side will follow by mid-year.  

The huts – as synonymous with this stretch of False Bay as the surf and the Table Mountain National Park's Muizenberg Peak behind them – need to go because the upgraded promenade will be built roughly two metres further inland. That setback is a direct response to climate change and rising sea levels during storm surges along the coastline.   

A colourful backstory

The huts' lineage runs deeper than their cheerful paint jobs suggest. They're the direct descendants of the Victorian "bathing machine" - wooden changing rooms on wheels that were dragged into the sea by horse so that bathers, mainly women, could change in strict privacy before entering the water.  

When laws requiring gender-segregated beaches were abolished in 1901, the machines lost their purpose. As a result, their wheels were removed, and they were simply parked on the sand, becoming the stationary beach huts we know today.

Muizenberg's versions, built by the City Council from the 1930s onwards, became a characterful fixture loved by locals. However, a 2017 proposal to remove them sparked public outcry, and a community-led restoration campaign, the Beach Hut Trust, was founded in 2020 to fight for their future. 

Now, they're being redesigned for a more future-proof version, as all eight huts will be rebuilt.

The City says new structures of improved quality and durability will go up in their place, designed to follow the historic pattern and arrangement that made them famous in the first place. So this isn't a goodbye forever, per se, it's more of a lengthy renovation. 

In the meantime, though, the current huts – weathered, characterful, and thoroughly photogenic – are living on borrowed time. So grab your camera, rope in a friend to recreate that classic shot before the cranes take over. 

Upgrade on track 

The wider upgrade, which kicked off in February 2025, is on track for completion by December 2026. It will deliver a new promenade walkway, upgraded ablutions, improved parking and a beachfront better equipped to handle whatever the False Bay waves throw at it.

About 15% of the precast concrete units for the new promenade are already in place, according to the City's latest update. At Surfer's Corner, you'll spot artisan steel formwork installed by hand to create the curved shape of the new sea wall and a sign that despite the construction chaos, there's a considerable amount of engineering craft going into this development.