Argyle Street

Argyle Street in the Central Business District was named in 1877 to commemorate the recent arrival of a party of Scottish settlers. There is a street of similar name in Glascow — a variation on the spelling Argyll which is a county in Scotland.

East London in 1877 was still a very small port. The original port on the West Bank had been bedevilled with political and economic problems and so was still no more than a hamlet. The village of Panmure on the East Bank had been established in 1857 solely for the German Military Settlers and then augmented by groups of German agricultural immigrants the following year.

With the decision in 1872 to create a proper harbour and the start to constructing a railway line to Queenstown in 1873, however, Panmure began to prosper because of a decision to place the station there. In that year, too, the two villages were amalgamated into a municipality. It would nevertheless take another few years before some of the streets were at last given names. Argyle Street was one of these.

Since East London had been established in 1847 and Panmure in 1857, why would it have taken another twenty years to begin giving names to the streets?

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The answer really does lie in a couldn't-care-less attitude of the East London population. Political and economic problems during the years from 1847 through to 1868 had removed all determination to prosper the village, and so the townspeople had settled into a lacklustre attitude. They even made no attempt whatever to create either a market or a municipality for themselves. Eventually a municipality was thrust upon them in 1873. Even so, the Council did virtually nothing important during its first triennial term. Only with the establishment of the Second Council in 1877 did anything important take place, and this included at last the naming of some of the streets.