Panners Lane in River Club, Sandton, is a quaint road which branches off of Coleraine Drive, close to the River Club Golf Course.
Many locals will pass Panners Lane in their daily commute without realising that it has a fascinating past, with close ties to the founding of Johannesburg and gold.
The Johannesburg Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Welham gave the Sandton Chronicle a short history of this historically intriguing road. “Long before the establishment of Sandton as a municipality in 1969, the area was managed by the Transvaal Board for the Development of Peri Urban Areas. The board developed rudimentary maps and in the absence of names for roads, designated the name Road 202 to what is now Panners Lane. The road branched off Shiel Ave [now Coleraine Drive] and became a dead-end near the Braamfontein Spruit,” said Welham.
She added that at various times in its history, Panners Lane was also known as Tsessebe Road.
Malcolm Wilson writes in the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation article, The history of Panners Lane, and writes, “The residents of Road 202 objected to the name Tsessebe as they wanted some record of the original discovery of gold in the Braamfontein Spruit in the naming of the road. After many suggestions such as Goldfinders Lane or Marais Lane, Jonathan Fisher, Len and Muriel Fisher’s son, came up with the name Panners Lane.”
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It was not until 22 February 1975 when the metal nameplate was put up on the corner of Coleraine Drive that Panners Lane was formally named.
As this gold discovery was one of the earliest in the Transvaal, it was important that this event be recorded and, last year, largely due to the impact of Wilson’s research, a blue plaque was installed on Panners Lane to commemorate the discovery of gold in the Braamfontein Spruit. Panners Lane was finally tarred in 1980.
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