Where to Stay in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal

What is Ladysmith known for?

The first is the Siege of Ladysmith, which ran from 2 November 1899 to 28 February 1900 and drew in two men the world would hear a great deal more from: Winston Churchill, reporting for The Morning Post, and Mahatma Gandhi, who served here with the stretcher-bearer corps he had raised among Natal's Indian community. The second began in December 1960. Joseph Shabalala formed Ladysmith Black Mambazo that month and named the choir for his family's home town, which is how a small inland town in South Africa ended up on record sleeves sold around the world.

What are the main landmarks in Ladysmith?

The Siege Museum holds the town's memory. It stands at 151 Murchison Street in a market house of 1884 that served as a ration post for civilians while the town was cut off, and its flagstone floors and cast-iron pillars were kept when the building was turned over to a collection of maps, uniforms and relics from the war of 1899 to 1902. Two howitzers stand outside.

The Town Hall beside it was hit by Boer artillery during the siege, and the pair of RML 6.3 inch howitzers on the pavement in front of it were worked by the British defenders. Faith left the rest. The Anglican All Saints Church went up in 1902 from flagstones cut in a quarry nearby, and the Soofie Mosque of 1969 stands on the bank of the Klip River.

South of the centre the Platrand ridge carries the battlefield memorials, among them the Burgher Memorial of 1979, six hands raised and one pointing down, over a crypt holding 310 re-interred Boer dead.

What is the history of Ladysmith?

Ladysmith begins with a land purchase. In 1847 a party of Boers bought ground from the Zulu king Mpande and set up the short-lived Republic of Klip River; the British annexed it that same year, and on 20 June 1850 the ground was proclaimed a township under the name Windsor. The name lasted sixteen weeks.

On 11 October 1850 it was changed to Ladysmith after Juana María de los Dolores de León Smith, the Spanish wife of Sir Harry Smith, who governed the Cape Colony from 1847 to 1852; a fort went up in 1860 against the Zulu. War made the name famous. Sir George White took the town as his base for the defence of Natal, Boer forces closed around it on 2 November 1899, and the Siege of Ladysmith ran 118 days while three attempts by Sir Redvers Buller to relieve it broke at Colenso, Spion Kop and Vaal Krantz.

Buller got through on 28 February 1900. What the siege left behind is still the town's main business with visitors, and the battlefields around it are kept as memorial sites across KwaZulu-Natal.

Where is Ladysmith?

The Klip River decides everything here. Ladysmith sits inside a loop of it, with the central business district and much of the housing lying within the river's flood basin, and in the 110 years to 1997 the town recorded 29 serious floods, with minor ones almost every year. Engineers answered twice.

The Windsor Dam, finished in 1949, silted up too quickly to hold much back; the Qedusizi Dam upstream, opened in 1997, was built as a flood attenuation structure for the express purpose of sparing the town. Past the water the ground rises. Ladysmith stands on the foothills of the Drakensberg about 26 km from Van Reenen's Pass, a long way inland of the KwaZulu-Natal coast, which is why it has always taken its connections by road.

What is the climate of Ladysmith?

Ladysmith has a subtropical highland climate, Cwb in the Köppen scheme, which on this side of the equator puts the warm, wet weather around the turn of the year and the cool, dry weather through the middle of it. Rain averages 639 mm a year. Most of that falls in the summer months, so the Klip River runs hardest exactly when the heat is worst, and the flood record follows the same calendar rather than the northern one.

The Drakensberg foothills hold the nights cooler here than on the KwaZulu-Natal coast.

How do you get to Ladysmith?

Almost everything arrives by road. The N11 runs north to Newcastle and south-west to the N3, while the R103, the old main road through the town, goes south to Colenso and west to the same freeway; Durban lies 230 kilometres to the south-east and Johannesburg 365 kilometres to the north-west. Rail still works here.

Danskraal Yard, on the Free State main line, marshals and maintains trains and track machinery, though the passenger station sits some way off, closer to the central business district. A small airport coded LAY handles light traffic from the western outskirts, just below Platrand, and the drive in from anywhere else in KwaZulu-Natal is counted in hours.