From head offices to tuckshops: where Harare’s city-centre anchors went, address by address

For most of the twentieth century, doing business in Zimbabwe meant going into town. The banks, the insurers, the big companies and the newspapers had their head offices on the grid of streets between Samora Machel Avenue and the railway, and the embassies and aid agencies sat just north of it in the Avenues.

Anyone who works in Harare knows that has changed. Head offices have gone to Borrowdale, Mount Pleasant and Highlands; the streets of the centre are lined with vendors, kombis and small shops. What nobody has published is the record: who left, when, where to, and who is still there. Without it, a landlord with a CBD building, a bank holding one as collateral, or a council setting rates and services is arguing from impressions.

So we built the record. We traced the head office addresses of 48 organisations, the central bank and 12 commercial banks and building societies, a dozen of the largest companies, state firms, seven embassies, eight UN agencies and lenders and four large NGOs, through their own websites as the Internet Archive saved them from 2009 onwards, and as they are today. We set that against 2016 to 2023 satellite measurements of where Harare has been building, and against what property firms report about rents and empty offices.

The record shows a CBD that did not empty in one go. It lost its anchors in layers, and the last layer left very recently.