Three Castles Building

Johannesburg, South Africa, South Africa

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The Three Castles Building in central Johannesburg is a late nineteenth‑century, turreted factory structure on the corner of Marshall and Goud streets, originally built as a cigarette factory and designed to resemble a small castle as an advertisement for the “Three Castles” cigarette brand.

Production began in the mid‑1890s, and the factory—opened officially by President Paul Kruger in 1899—soon mechanised, turning out hundreds of thousands of cigarettes a day before being taken over by the United Tobacco Company, which used it until the 1950s.

In the later twentieth century the building housed various tenants, including the Dungeon Club, one of Johannesburg’s longest‑running gay nightclubs, but fires and neglect in the 1990s and 2013 left it badly damaged, so today it survives as a dilapidated yet iconic heritage landmark frequently listed as “in danger” due to its poor condition.