Peace found Sidney in Johannesburg. This city of gold was also a city of dust, its untarred roads and those who traversed them draped in a coppery film. Johannesburg had grown out of a gold mining camp, its inhabitants intent on one aim. ‘Money making and money grabbing is the alpha and omega of those resident on these fields’, wrote one of them around 1893. By the early 1900s it was still ‘no better than a mining camp, many of the buildings being of wood and iron, including the Municipal Offices’, recalled Albert West, a British businessman and associate of Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi.

The Market Square, bounded by Sauer and Rissik Streets on its west and east and Market and President Streets on the south and north, was the town's heart, where produce and cattle were traded. Surrounded by ornate Victorian buildings with turrets and gables, the square itself was ‘a huge sandy area large enough for a span of sixteen oxen to swing around with its long wagon load of farm produce. Even the main streets were rough tracks which would often become impassable during a dust storm.’ White pedestrians bustled along on sidewalks protected from the sun by cast-iron verandas; black people walked in the streets, where cyclists jostled with horse-drawn carriages. Public transport was rudimentary. Rickshaws for hire could be found at Market Square. Commissioner Street, the main east-west thoroughfare that lay just south of Market Street, had a horse-drawn tramway nick-named the ‘toast-rack’ that ran between Jeppe and Fordsburg.