A city isn't a city until it has a church, a post office, a brothel and a watering hole. Early Jozi ticked all four boxes, and its old pubs are perfect to tell the story of the city, one round at a time. That's the inspiration behind the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation's "historic pubs tour", which takes place this Saturday.Adam Golding, who will lead the tour with Sebastian Chatov, says the tour will be a first of its kind in this format for the foundation.Bars and pubs tell the story of the early social life of the Rand. They sprang up as thousands of people descended on Ferreirastown in the gold rush of 1886."A proliferation of bars soon followed. There was the rise of everything from exclusive gentleman's clubs through to illegal shebeens," says Golding.Many of the old buildings still stand and some even exist as bars, or at least still have architectural and historical value.Golding says the tour will be about finding out which bar holds the title of the oldest in a city that turns 130 this year.It will also be about listening to how history was made in some of Jozi's iconic watering holes.Harrison Street's Guildhall, for example, was one of the oldest in the city, tracing its first days to 1888, just two years after Johannesburg was founded.The Radium Beer Hall in Orange Grove claims its origins as both polite tearoom and hidden shebeen in the late 1920s and 1930s.But its real claim to fame revolves around what took place on its bar.Female trade unionist Mary Fitzgerald is said to have famously climbed onto the counter brandishing a pickaxe as she rallied workers during the 1922 miners' strike. It earned her the nickname "Pickaxe Mary".The Sunnyside Park Hotel bar in Parktown is significant for having been the home of Lord Alfred Milner, who was British High Commissioner in South Africa in 1895.One of the twists of the tour, says Golding, is that this "pub crawl" will incorporate the use of Uber. Cabs will transfer tour participants from bar to bar."Uber has transformed the way people travel in a city. So, instead of charging more for a bus tour, we thought we would incorporate something completely modern," says Golding.That's history merging with modernity - it's worth raising a glass to.For more information visit the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation website at www.joburgheritage.co.za..