ABSTRACT
Social institutions are important repositories (subjects) of memories and also valu-
able ‘albums’ of broken instances, promising possibilities, and lived moments in
the lives of those associated with them. As ‘memory sites’, social institutions
have important stories to tell about the people linked to the facilities, their geo-
graphical and social location, and the ways in which institutions in the mod-
ernising city informed different aspects of their lives. Such images of institutional
and city life offer helpful insights into how sets of social practices are constructed
and deconstructed to regulate objects and people, about the ways in which time
is defined and rewritten into space at particular moments in the modernising
city, and how this informs and informed the emergence of various social forma-
tions in South Africa. Indeed, I suggest in this chapter that a social institution like
the Ottery School of Industries (located in Cape Town), and an understanding of
its evolution, provides communities, the researcher and the historian with a
unique site of memory to unravel vital aspects of identity-making and social land-
scaping in the formative years before apartheid.
