Victoria: The Lowdown

Did you know that we are all part of a vast space/time continuum that never stops? This universal dynamic produces an interesting anthology of experience that we call “history”. In one of these beautiful pockets of time there is a story about a little city called “Victoria” and this our version of that story.

Claims to Fame and Sordid Secrets

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, South-eastern Vancouver Island was the home of the Northern Straits Salish peoples and in what is now the greater Victoria area were 12 interlinked Songhee villages. The closest one to where you are currently situated was just down the street and across the harbour, and was called Lekwammen, which means “the place of the Cradles.”

Victoria is the oldest city in Western Canada; founded in 1843 as a Hudson Bay Company trading post by James Douglas. It was known first as Fort Camosun and then as Fort Victoria (after Queen Victoria, you know, the one who was never amused) and finally just, Victoria. Victoria became the provincial capital when British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation in 1871.

In 1858 when the Caribou Gold Rush began, Victoria was the main port, supply base, outfitting centre, home base, launch pad, last warm shower for miners on their way to the Caribou gold fields and remained the largest, richest, shiniest city in all of British Columbia for most of the nineteenth century. However, with the construction of the Transcontinental railway with a terminus in Vancouver, Victoria was left languishing on the sidelines while Vancouver boomed into development. Determined not to become a sleepy backwater Victoria began to cultivate an image of genteel civility.

The main man behind Victoria’s transformation was Francis Rattenbury, one of British Columbia's best known architects. He was responsible for the city’s most famous landmarks including: the British Columbia Parliament Buildings (1893-1898), the Empress Hotel (1904-1908) and Crystal Gardens (1923). It was during this period that the famous Butchart Gardens, a glorious sunken garden that transformed an abandoned limestone quarry, was begun and by the early 1920s was attracting 50,000 people a year. When Rudyard Kipling visited Victoria, he described The City of Gardens as “Brighton Pavilion with the Himalayas as a backdrop.”

Victoria is also home to Canada’s oldest Chinatown and Fan Tan Alley is Canada’s narrowest commercial alley. But Chinatown was not always the home of dim sum and junk food, beneath the eaves and pagodas was an enclave of opium dens, brothels and gambling houses patronized by many but acknowledged by none.