Yet notwithstanding its relative youth at 82 years, and precisely because of its small scale, the town provides a very visible illustration of the kinds of urban changes associated with contemporary conditions - the move from rail based transportation to freeway access; growing informalisation; an economy shifting from primary agricultural production and secondary manufacturing to a service based economy increasingly realiant on tourism."

"At the start of our tour we all had serious reservations about whether the area had a history worth recording, or even architecture worth noting. Unlike similar reports compiled by the late Vivienne Japha about the small towns in the Western Cape and the conservation studies of Luderitz (1979) and Wakkerstroom (2001) assembled by Wally Peters, the town history we intended writing dealt with a town which was neither charming nor particularly old.

At best BelaBela was a rather unprepossessing dorp on the way to somewhere else or missed entirely, 10km west of a flat strech of the N1 tollroad between Hammanskraal and Polokwane. Few of us had ever heard of Settlers, 15km east in the opposite direction.

But the reality proved different. We discovered an untapped history and many buildings worth documenting. Even the smallest building - the old Anglo-Boer War block house, no larger than 40 square metres, and the tiny synagogue, provided points of departure which allowed students to mine the rich seams of architectural history, expanding and extrapolating themes way beyond the narrow confines of the structures they had set out to study. The two days students devoted to urban research, and the two days spent documenting individual buildings proved inadequate and many students returned to BelaBela and Settlers during their vacation in the first week of September to consolidate their findings or gather additional material."