Church Square is one of the three early areas of land around which the early town developed and its boundaries probably began to be defined in 1679 when the first public building, a slave lodge was built.

In 1701 the Dutch Reformed Church, known as the Groote Kerk, was erected on its southern side

The slave monument is a memorial site on cobbled Church Square in Cape Town.

The memorial laid out on the Church Square, itself a slave site of great significance helps us to rethink the past. The memorial comprises eleven granite blocks, two are placed on a raised plinth on the South West corner of Church Square close to the Iziko Slave Lodge. A further nine are grouped in a tight grid close to the slave tree plaque. Their common “footprint” represents our common humanity, their different heights represent growth and importance we attach to the youth of South Africa.