'peace corner'[2]) is a residential suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, located at the foot of Table Mountain and Devil's Peak.
[6] On 1 April 1888, Cape Town's mayor commemorated the opening of wash houses near the Platteklip (Dutch: "flat stone") Stream.
This change was made as downstream small-holdings owners wanted clean water for crops and new sanitation laws were outlawing washing laundry in public streams.
They used corn husks to scour lathered cloth and used nearby bushes, trees and rocks for places to hang wet laundry for drying.
[7] Today, the site of the wash houses forms part of a roughly 3 km Washerwomen Trail and has been turned into an overnight cottage through SANParks.
[12] Disa Park residential towers were built in the suburb in the late 1960s in response to a "white housing crisis" in racially segregated Cape Town.
[3] The circular shape was intended to minimise the impact of the unrelenting Southeaster wind that blows from October to March each year, and to give affordable housing to over a thousand residents with panoramic views of the mountain, city and sea.
[3] In 2004, Wallpaper listed Disa Park as one of the best buildings in Cape Town,[3] however, the local response to the towers was almost instantly negative when they were completed in late 1969.
[3] Though the base of the towers begins below the Table Mountain National Park, the 18 storeys stretch well beyond that, reaching 209 metres above sea level.
[13] Local kramats or "mazaars" are Islamic shrines marking the graves of holy men or notable religious leaders who died at the Cape, often after being banished by the Dutch from countries like India, Ceylon and Java.
[14] The local Deer Park forest and stream in Vredehoek provided sanctuary to runaway enslaved or imprisoned people.
[17] The large concentration of the similar buildings give the area a unique character that a 2017 campaign by The Greater Vredehoek Heritage Action Group attempted to protect from threats of gentrification.
[20] While fire on Table Mountain can be beneficial to local fynbos plants, the threat to human settlement is also considered when deciding whether to extinguish.
[4] Vredehoek is popular among dual income households yet to have children,[2] and the suburb has been going through an urban revival as older blocks of flats are being replaced with apartments.
[6] Many of the flats in Vredehoek were first owned by Jewish immigrants and have names such as Mont Sholem, Tel Hai Court and Herzlia.