Weymouth in the west

Vancouver – Canada’s gateway to the Pacific. Its site, nestled in the Rocky Mountains and sheltered from the ocean by Vancouver Island, has seen human activity for over 8,000 years. In the 1860s a new settlement emerged – called Gastown after ‘Gassy’ Jack Deighton, the proprietor of the local tavern – but with the arrival of the first transcontinental train twenty years later came a new name, one inspired by the Royal Navy Officer George Vancouver who had charted North America’s western coast a century earlier. Since then it’s attracted inhabitants from across the country and around the world with its consistently high quality of life and reputation for progressive thinking – becoming not only Canada’s most densely populated city but also one of its most diverse.


While Canadians were taking October’s second Monday to eat turkey and celebrate Thanksgiving (a holiday of uncertain origins that now seems associated with the harvest), we flew from the country’s busiest airport to its second in a little over four hours. We quickly found that architecturally Vancouver offers little, its skyscrapers indistinguishable from other North American cities, its apartment blocks with their pastel cladding reminiscent of English seaside towns in the 1970s. But as befits its extraordinary location, Vancouver’s natural scenery is stunning. First we headed to Stanley Park at the city’s northern tip, and walked part of the Vancouver Sea Wall around its perimeter. With its trees resplendent in autumnal colours and seawater glistening in the sunshine, we understood why a friend had remarked that this is Canada’s best view.


Stanley Park is also home to a village of totem poles, testament not only to the long history of aboriginal settlement on the land where Vancouver now stands – land which remains unceded by the Musqueam people – but also to the many First Nation communities that live nearby. At the Museum of Anthropology in the University of British Columbia we learnt more about totem poles, their role as memorial or welcome, and just some of the stories they tell about the history of a tribe or clan. We also saw the Haida houses outside the Museum, designed by the Canadian Haida artist Bill Reid to show where the Haida people would hold potlatches (lavish gift-giving ceremonies) to commemorate significant occasions.


Culturally, Vancouver seems keen to assert itself by diverging from the mainstream. The Vancouver International Film Festival, for instance, attracts fewer celebrities than TIFF and prides itself on showing less recognisable films. At the Vancouver Art Gallery we enjoyed a small exhibition of the province’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, most famous among them Emily Carr who incorporated indigenous imagery into her landscapes. The rest of the gallery is devoted to contemporary work, but the exhibitions we saw were so far from the mainstream that they’re unlikely to receive wider recognition: Peter Morin’s photographs at Buckingham Palace looked more like bad travel snaps than a protest against colonialism, and Kevin Schmidt’s “DIY HiFi” was, well, exactly that.


To recover with a little retail therapy, we took a water taxi to Granville Island (spotting seals in the harbour en route). On this sandbar in False Creek, just south of downtown Vancouver, corrugated-tin factories have been taken over by farmers, shopkeepers and artists. We spent hours browsing and sampling among the array of delightful market stalls that sold everything from fudge to photographs. The coffee and doughnuts were delicious! Whisper it, but we think Granville Island is even nicer than Toronto’s St Lawrence Market.


As one of Canada’s newer cities, it’s not surprising that Vancouver’s culture is less historic or that its relations with the country’s First Nations are more openly tense. Nevertheless, with its mix of urban and coastal Vancouver is well known across Canada for healthy living and diversity, and we weren’t disappointed. We left eager to continue our exploration of British Columbia and Canada’s western coast. Fortunately Victoria, BC’s capital, is only a ferry-ride away….

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