History behind Glen View, Glen Norah and Warren Park

Harare is a city layered with memory - some preserved, some forgotten, and much of it paved over in the fast pulse of modern life. Yet every suburb has a story, and sometimes, the story lives quietly in the name. Glen View, Glen Norah and Warren Park are not just locations on a map. They are footprints of people, farms and landscapes that shaped today's urban sprawl. To know these stories is to understand how Harare became what it is, street by street.

In 1946, just a year after the end of the Second World War in Europe, Glen View was nothing more than open farmland owned by Mr Baxter. It was vast, stretching outward from the rising slope that gave him a vantage point across his lands - lands which extended as far as what is today Highfields, and further towards the Mukuvisi River. The area's original inhabitants knew it as KwaBhakasta, a Shona interpretation of Baxter, whose presence defined the place before the city took shape around it.

Baxter's farmhouse still stands today, quietly absorbed into the urban fabric, now the site of St Peter's Kubatana School. It is a reminder that the suburbs we know were once farmland - quiet, green, and worlds away from the dense housing that would later rise upon them. The name Glen View quite literally reflects this geography: Glen - an old English word for a narrow valley, and View - for the clear vantage of the land around it.

If Glen View was the outlook, Glen Norah was the valley itself. Named after Norah, Baxter's wife, the area formed Norah's Glen - a narrow valley softened by the Mukuvisi and carpeted in eucalyptus, which locals today simply call Mapuranga. These trees were not natural to the land; they were planted during Baxter's farming era and thrived, becoming a signature feature of Glen Norah's landscape long before houses and roads replaced the open fields.

High Glen Road, now a bustling artery connecting suburbs and marketplaces, was once part of that farm route stretching all the way down to the river. Glen Norah's park, today a recreational space for thousands, was once a dam which served the farm before it was drained in the mid-1960s. The transition from farmland to suburb was not instant - it was a process of carving streets from soil, replacing fields with housing, and gradually burying the agricultural rhythms that once defined the place.

Across the city, another name also carries history yet often escapes attention - Warren Park. Unlike the Baxters, this one honours two cousins, Robert and Herbert Warren, who left the Eastern Cape of South Africa and settled south of Salisbury's limits. Their farm became the foundation of what is now Warren Park, a suburb whose growth mirrors the outward expansion of Harare itself. Where cattle once grazed, generations now live, trade, learn and dream.

These stories matter. They remind us that the city is not accidental - it is layered with human decisions, migrations, farms that vanished under brick and tar, and families whose names now anchor communities they never imagined. Harare's suburbs were once landscapes defined by rivers, timber, dams and soil. Today, they are defined by people, density and movement. Yet the old names remain, whispering history into everyday conversation.

Understanding where we live is more than trivia. It is connection. As Glen View rises with new builds, as Glen Norah continues to hum with life, and as Warren Park evolves with each passing generation, we carry with us names that began as personal stories. The city may have changed, but the names endure - and through them, so does memory.