Doornfontein
place in Gauteng, South Africa
Doornfontein ( DOORN-fon-tayn) is an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, located to the east of the city centre. It is in Region F of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality. In the 1930s, it attracted many Jewish immigrants, becoming the main hub for the city's Jewish community. Black African residents, then a minority in the suburb, lived in slum-yards. Under the Slums Clearance Act 1934, the slum-yards were cleared and many residents were relocated to Orlando, Soweto. Since the late 1970s, Doornfontein and other inner-city suburbs of Johannesburg have underdone high levels of white flight to the city's northern suburbs.
History
The area, whose name means "thorn fountain", was originally the southern part of a farm owned by Frederick Jacobus Bezuidenhout, and was proclaimed a public diggings after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The suburb was laid out in the late 1880s by Thomas Yeo, and became the first residential suburb of Johannesburg. In 1897 the freehold of the suburb was bought by the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company (JCI), owned by the mining magnate Barney Barnato. The suburb (and Berea) were developed by the company and the district became known as "Millionaire's Row".
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5297240. Authority coordinates are -26.183, 28.050. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1886 and 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “Doornfontein” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.