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THE CHANGING FACE OF THIKA TOWN (PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATIONS)

For quite a long time, Thika Town had remained an old shack with old structures, some as old as the 1920s. The town's CBD barely grew to march the big "industrial hub" status everyone believed it to be.

In the early 70s till around the year 2006, everything that was consumed in Thika Town virtually came from Nairobi. Due to its proximity to Nairobi City, majority of its residents preferred to invest in the city at its expense, thus leaving Thika Town to be swallowed by the city. Thika depended fully on what Nairobi had to offer. Those Thikarians who were able to travel to Nairobi always made a kill whenever they came back with 'vitu za Nairobi'.




That drastically changed with the completion of the Thika Superhighway and the infiltration of the internet into the town. All over sudden, Thika people started 'seeing the light'. They started realising that there was life beyond Nairobi. The completion of the Thika Super Highway also eased the movement of both people and cargo, bringing Nairobi nearer to them. This meant more business for less and eventually the evolution of Thika Town.




The congestion in Nairobi neighbourhoods also forced the expansion of the city to its outlying areas. Kiambu County became the biggest beneficiary of this expansion. This development lured into the neighbouring towns, potential property developers and investors, with Thika being the biggest beneficially due to the availability of land and its ease of securing relevant land transfer and ownership documents. Its strategic location enabled these entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas on how to integrate real estate development with other amenities such as shopping malls, golf courses and affordable leisure centres.

This has made it emerge as one of the most popular developers destination who are willing to put up multi-million-shilling investment projects.





The result of this has been a real transformation of the face of Thika Town. Thika has started witnessing the emergence of skyscrapers, something that most of the older generation only imagined and witnessed just in Nairobi. That generation of people never imagined a storey building that went beyond 4-storeys. They never thought of a day they would climb on top of any building in Thika using an elevator.

All they knew of and could relate with was those old structures of the pre-independence era that had rusty roofs. Those that constituted of shop on the front side but behind them were residential houses mostly owned by Kenyans of Indian origin.


Fast-forward,the year is 2015. Majority of those shanties are now extinct. In their place stand huge skyscrapers and other modern structures with very unique architectural designs. Houses are sprouting up every single day in Thika Town. Anyone who last visited the town about ten years ago will forgiven if he visited it today and got lost in the process.



This is a total transformation of the face of Thika Town, thanks to exposure and the ease of movement.

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