Maboneng
The name comes from Sesotho — 'place of light' — and in 2009 that was more aspiration than description. What stood here, along Fox Street and into old Jeppestown, was a cluster of empty warehouses and a 1909 liquor store nobody wanted. Then Jonathan Liebmann, in his twenties, started buying them.
Today that 1909 building is Arts on Main, where William Kentridge founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Across the street, a residential block assembled from 140 shipping containers catches the light through diagonal window cuts. David Adjaye designed a boutique hotel. A graffiti artist named Freddy Sam painted Nelson Mandela ten storeys tall. Maboneng is the kind of place that arrived fast and has been arguing with itself ever since.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it around Market on Main — Sundays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Arts on Main — then drift down Fox Street before the afternoon crowds thin out. The 12 Decades Art Hotel gets mentioned often: each room designed by a different artist, each one keyed to a decade of Johannesburg's history, for just over $40 a night.
Deals in Maboneng
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How Maboneng came to be
In 2008 and 2009, Jonathan Liebmann and his Propertuity Development Company — backed by Jonathan Beare — began acquiring derelict buildings on the eastern edge of Johannesburg's CBD. The first conversion was Arts on Main at 264 Fox Street, a former liquor store dating to 1909. Liebmann rented studio space to artists including William Kentridge and Mikhael Subotzky, then named the wider district Maboneng. Jacques van der Watt and Bradley Kirshenbaum launched Market on Main in early 2011.
The story took a harder turn mid-decade. RMH Property bought into Propertuity in 2016, Liebmann departed in 2018, and by 2019 RMH had liquidated many of the properties. Development continued regardless: the six-block Jewel City project opened in 2020, adding 2,200 apartments, offices, retail, and a school — a different kind of ambition from the artist-studio origins, and one the neighbourhood is still absorbing.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Johannesburg is warm and sunny for most of the year, but summer afternoons — roughly October through March — bring fast, dramatic thunderstorms. Carry a light rain layer if you're visiting then. Winters are dry, clear, and cold at night.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.