Dear Readers, the Distillery District in Toronto is, as you might have guessed, based on the site of the Gooderham and Worts whisky distillery, founded in 1832. These days it’s something of a destination, with coffee shops and restaurants (including the loudest French restaurant in the world, Cluny, not recommended if you actually want to hear your dining companions). A minor digression here: the Michelin guide suggests that the thing most often complained about is not surly waiters or high prices, but noise, and it’s not just old codgers like us either. Cynical me thinks that people drink and eat faster when they can’t hear one another because there’s nothing else to do, but restaurant managers suggest it creates an ‘ambience’. I’ve been known to turn round and leave a restaurant if the noise is too ‘energetic’. For me, eating is about conviviality and catching up with friends, a chance to enjoy sharing food and good company. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

Anyway! Back to the Distillery District. This is our last full day in Toronto, so it was good to sit and have a coffee in Balzac and catch up with one another – there’s always some stress involved when visiting, what with John’s Mum being so frail. Yesterday she was making sure that we’d all had a ‘chocolate walnut’ before going back to the classroom. No, John’s mum wasn’t a teacher, so we’re bemused as to where this is coming from,. but as she’d been asleep all day on her 98th birthday earlier this week, this was a great improvement.

I wanted to buy something for my god daughter’s little boy back in the UK, and we found a great Canadian baby clothes shop. Some of the outfits might or might not have featured moose and bears.

And on the way back, we stopped to take a picture of the’vertical city’ as it becomes still more vertical. Goodness knows how many more towers will have appeared by the time we get back next year….

Dear Readers, yesterday evening I was going for a drink with a friend at the Writers Room at the Park Plaza Hotel. As is my wont, I got there very early, and started off by taking some photos of the pillars in Museum subway station, showing Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife, a Toltec warrior from Central America, and my favourite, an indigenous bear figure (I love the paws!)

The Royal Ontario Museum is a mash-up of a traditional building from 1912, and the Libeskind addition from 2007. The latter has always been controversial, with opinions differing from the Globe and Mail architecture critic, who described it as ‘angsty and hellish’ to the Toronto Star critic who described it as ‘a monument’. Alas, it has suffered from leaking and cracking ever since its first winter, and is currently hidden behind billboards. The exhibition spaces certainly seemed an awkward shape and size when we were there last. Nonetheless, it certainly makes a statement.

And I am very sad to be heading home just as this exhibition is starting – very bad timing on my part.

On I go to the Writers’ Room at the Park Plaza. They seem to have caged in their gas connection as if it were some kind of dangerous beast, which I suppose it is…

It has what looks suspiciously Henry Mooresque statuary outside…

…and inside everything is coming up roses (and other flowers)

I go up to the 17th floor and inquire about the table that my host has booked. Alas, his details are nowhere to be seen. In some indignation I pull up the email. Yikes. I’m supposed to be at the Library Bar in the Fairmont hotel. Apparently I’m the third person to have made that mistake today.

Back to Museum, south to Union, through the PATH to the hotel, and a brief stop to capture yet more floral abundance…

And then, finally (and only 13 minutes late) I get my Kir Royale. Cheers!

The subway trains of Toronto are a temporary home for the city’s homeless, addicted and mentally ill. In the past two weeks, I’ve seen a man in a wheelchair travelling up and down the carriages asking for cash, which no one seems to carry any more.  A beautiful young girl, probably not out of her teens, was drifting along, asking everyone for ‘a dollar, just a dollar’. One woman told her she was too pretty to be addicted to crack, and the girls shriek of frustration could be heard halfway down the train. A bowed over, grey-faced man hunched in a corner, playing his phone out loud. On the streets, people are sleeping on the subway grates for warmth. People leave them coffee and sandwiches. One man is barefoot and has left his surgical boot on the pavement next to him, along with an empty cat carrier.

There are plenty of homeless people in London, but it is very visible here in Toronto, and I wonder who, if anybody, is looking out for these people? There are shelters and hostels for sure, but people seem so fragile and vulnerable out here on the streets. I am reminded that when I worked in a night shelter, the average life expectancy for a person who was homeless was 43. years old.

No answers, but here’s a poem….

Homeless

By Juliet Kono

My son lives on the streets.
We don’t see each other much.
Like a mother who puts white lilies
on the headstone of a dead child,
I put money into his bank account,
clothes into E-Z Access storage
and pretend he’s far away—
at a boarding school, or in a foreign country.
Nights, I dream fairy tales about him.
I dream he becomes a prince,
scholar or warrior who rescues me
from sorrow, the way he rescued me
when he was a child and said,
“Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea
into the room of his father’s acrimony—
brave, standing tall in the forest
fire of his father’s scorn. I wake
to the empty sound of wind in the trees.
He says he wants to live with me.
I say I can’t live with him—
boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm.
Nothing can hold him in,
the walls of a house too thin.
Back home, I had seen
the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them”
street bums on Mamo Street,
and he’s like them.
These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him,
I circle the city. One day,
I see him on his bike.
People give him wide berth,
the same way birds avoid power lines,
oncoming cars or trees.
I park on a side street.
Wild-eyed, he flies the block
as if in a holding pattern.
Not of my body, not of my hopes,
he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.

Dear Readers, it wasn’t a very clement day today, but we decided to head east to The Beaches, as we always do when we’re in Toronto – there’s something about a walk along the boardwalk that clears the head. Yesterday we spent four hours at John’s mother’s care home to ‘celebrate’ her 98th birthday. Sadly, she was asleep the whole time, in spite of various attempts to wake her. Every time she stirred we sprang forward in the hope that she would surface, but no such luck. Still, we’ll pop up to see her again tomorrow, and maybe she’ll be a bit more conscious. And maybe she sensed that we were there, and that we cared for her, wherever she was.

Back at the Beaches, the handsome houses that are supposedly being ‘re-developed’ are still behind a hoarding, gradually rotting away. There were a lot of poster protests about it last year.

In good news, though, the sparrows and the house martins are both nesting around the swimming pool, as they’ve done in previous years…

Although the weather was a bit overcast, it was still a lovely walk along the boardwalk…

…and it’s only really the lack of the smell of rotting seaweed that reminds me that this is a lake, not the sea.

And, as usual it’s interesting to look at ‘weeds’. Following on from the Marsh Violas a few days ago, I spotted this plant…not a great photo, but! I do believe this is White Corydalis (Corydalis ochroleuca), actually a European plant which appears to have taken off in Eastern Canada.

And then it’s time to head home, on the 501 streetcar. We just heard that our hotel is going to be renovated later this year (after the World Cup, when it will be packed to the proverbial gunnels) which is exciting, as until recently it was scheduled for redevelopment or sale. It sounds as if there’s been a change of heart, which is good news as the Cambridge Suites feels like home. Fingers crossed the prices don’t go up toooooooo much.

Common Swifts by Bruno Liljefors

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Well Readers, actually not first swifts at all – I saw my first swifts on Friday 24th April, just before I left the UK for Toronto. What a joy they are, screaming between the houses against an azure sky. I’ve written about them before, and  am still waiting to see if anyone will show any interest at all in my swift nesting box. Quite possibly I should have put up half a dozen, as these birds are communal nesters, but the scaffold came down before I got my act together.

There is something about the return of the swift that is reassuring, even  though the birds are Red Listed in the UK, and their numbers have declined by 66% since the 1950s. Is it lack of insects, lack of nesting places, or even the way that the weather patterns in El Niño and La Niña years affect the places in Africa where the swifts over winter. It isn’t clear, but it is yet another thing to worry about. Still, in 2026 they’re here, and not only here, but early. And here is a poem by Anne Stevenson. See what you think.

Swifts

By Anne Stevenson

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, ‘The swifts are back!’

Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It’s the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.

The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.
But a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers
Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water’s forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.

Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,

So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.
And they stayed there. ‘Well,’ said the Raven, after years of this,
‘I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
On condition that you give up rest.’

‘Yes, yes,’ screamed the swifts, ‘We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!’

So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return

Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so
We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
Bolts in the world’s need: swift
Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply

Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world’s breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur,
And watch the miracle.

Dear Readers, the last few days have involved skipping all around Toronto and catching up with lots of old friends, both human and architectural, including my favourite fountain in the whole world, the Berczy Park dog fountain. I’ve written about this before, but it never fails to charm me, although it is looking a little more decrepit every year. This dog is the only one with a name – he’s called ‘Smiley’ after a blind therapy dog who worked with the St John’s Ambulance brigade in Toronto.

Now you might remember that there is a single cat perched on the fountain, looking at the birds on a nearby lamp post…

Well, I have just learned (and I am very excited about this) that there’s a second cat perched on a utility box. But what is he looking at?

Well, the designer of the dog fountain, Claude Cormier, recently passed away at the age of only 63. But he was planning a cat park to the west, on Wellington and Spadina, so at some point this week I shall take a wander to see what, if anything, has come to fruition yet. Watch this space!

Something else has made me chuckle every time I’ve passed on the northbound subway for the past week.

Toronto’s hidden fight club doesn’t seem to be all that hidden, unless several million annual commuters don’t count 🙂

And finally, while we were taking a break in Ramsden Park in Rosedale, I noticed some flowers under a tree, which turned out to be violets…Marsh Violets (Viola palustris) in fact. What delicate pale beauties they are! This plant grows right across Europe and North America, and loves damp conditions, as its name would suggest, so it was interesting to see them growing in profusion on a bank in a city park.

Dear Readers, cherry blossom time (or Sakura) has become quite the thing in Toronto over the past few decades. This Friday was expected to be peak cherry blossom time, and so many people were heading to High Park that cars were banned, and people were being asked not to shake the trees or pull down branches for photographs. Hah! I decided to head for the smaller but less frenetic cherry blossom site outside the Robarts Library in the University of Toronto.

It felt really joyful here – lots of people were photographing the blossoms, and one another, but all were respectful of the trees, and were clearly enjoying themselves. After a long wet April, it was lovely to see some sun, even though there’s a frost warning for tonight.

The library itself was opened in 1973 and is a fine example of brutalist architecture, though not everybody was impressed – it’s been nicknamed ‘the turkey’ and ‘the peacock’ for its extravagant shape, and is apparently not the easiest building to use (though it contains 4.5 million books so it can’t be all bad). Also, it could apparently be the model for the secret library in Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ – Eco spent much of his time at the University of Toronto writing the book, and apparently there is a strong resemblance between the stairwell of the Robarts library and the library in the book.

What made me especially excited about this little expedition was that it was a) spontaneous and b) I did it all on my own while John was off visiting a friend. I was actually planning on finding a spot to read my Jan Morris biography when I found myself irresistibly drawn onto Line One of the subway. I often feel that I only really start to know a place when I explore it myself, without relying on someone else to know which way to go. And so it was a lot of fun to find the cherry blossom, and to then walk through the very varied university buildings and to find my way home. I felt like a proper flanêuse, for sure.

Dear Readers, one of the big delights of being in Toronto is that I actually have quite a lot of time to read, what with the seven-hour plane flight, the jet lag and the occasional free afternoon, so here are a couple of recommendations.

First up is Patrick Radden Keefe’s ‘London Falling’. I’ve loved the author since I read ‘The Empire of Pain’, about the Sackler family and the opiod epidemic. ‘London Falling’ is a story of money, duplicity, crime and corruption in London, following the death of 19 year-old Zac Brettler in a ‘fall’ from a balcony in a luxury flat. I’m not normally a big reader of crime fiction, but this book manages to encompass so much more than one tragedy, and raises a number of interesting questions about complicity and cover-up. I couldn’t put it down.

Just holding a book by publisher Fitzcarraldo always feels as if it should improve my intellect just by osmosis 🙂 but this is an excellent book. Author Joanna Pocock made a trip across the US by Greyhound bus in 2006. In 2023 she retraces her tracks, to see what’s changed. Some of the changes are in her: as an older woman she’s subject to a lot less harassment, and she’s a lot more grounded (her 2006 trip followed her third miscarriage, and her recognition that she was not going to be a mother). But the biggest change that she notes is everyone’s reliance on phones, and how much rarer it is to have a random conversation with a stranger. She also notes how many bus stations are run down or closed. In Phoenix, one bus stop is in the middle of the road in temperatures of over 40 degrees. She relates how homeless people are constantly being referred for third-degree burns when they pass out on pavements which can cook flesh within a few minutes. This is a fascinating book that will have me thinking about what is happening to us as a society for months to come.

Finally, I’m currently reading ‘Jan Morris – A Life’ by Sara Wheeler. Jan Morris packed enough into her life for several normal people, and she was something of an enigma – an apologist for Empire who was also its harsh critic, one of the first people to climb Everest who later transitioned from James to Jan, an acute observer but (apparently) a terrible parent. Wheeler’s first chapter is an absolute corker, as she describes staying at Morris’s house, sleeping in a room with no bedside light and bats hanging from the rafters waiting for her to turn off her head torch. It’s early days, but I’m really enjoying the book so far.

So what are your recommendations, Readers? My bedside book pile has room for a couple more, before the ceiling gets in the way 🙂

Dear Readers, the Concourse Building is a splendid example of Canadian Art Deco, but all is not as it seems. It stands right next to the glass and steel EY tower (in front of which stands the slightly-scary giant child sculpture), and if you look at it from the corner, you can see that it’s actually incorporated into the tower. In fact, the original 1928 building was dismantled in 2013 after much discussion between the developers and the city planners, but lots of the original detailing was preserved.

The mural above the front door depicts the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) and was designed by J.E.H MacDonald, one of the Group of Seven artists who met in Toronto, and who created a distinctively Canadian style.

There are mosaics under the arch depicting modern innovations such as planes and steam ships in the outer panels, and a dove, ploughshare and deer with birds in the centre.

There were apparently quotes by Canadian poets above the elevators in the main concourse, which were meant to reduce stress as the office workers waited for their day to start. Examples include:

Theodore H Rand  “The years are wise though the days are foolish.”

Charles GD Roberts  “Life is good, and love is eager. In the playground of the Sun.”

Katherine Hale  “I wish that some quaint miracle Might happen even today, Whereby the universe should speak And men kneel down and pray.”

I wonder what the impact was? Which of those poems (if any) would bring a spring to your step? I confess that I quite like the Rand quote, which I’ve been pondering on myself.

The original tiles at the top of the building were replaced in the new building.

So, the new building is something of a pastiche – a fine example of what my friend the Gentle Author calls ‘facadism’ (where most of a building is demolished but the frontage is preserved, to give the misleading impression that the original building still exists. I am glad that some of the features of the old Concourse Building have been saved, but much has been lost or moved. I couldn’t get inside the building (it is a corporate HQ after all) but there are some fantastic photos, and some more history, over at the Torontojourney416 website.

Dear Readers, like many cities has a range of public art, ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre and everything inbetween. The statue above, by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz, is very new, and I found it very moving: its location, in the garden of the United Metropolitan Church, is a gathering place for homeless people, close to several hostels and also to the local hospital.

And then of course there are the Canada geese of the Eaton Centre, looking very spick and span at the moment. And where the hell did the phrase ‘spick and span’ come from? Apparently it’s a ship building term, where a ‘spick’ was a metal nail, and a ‘span’ was a wood chip – ‘spick and span new’ was the original term, meaning a brand new ship with everything in order.

Anyway, after that digression, here are some geese….we saw two actual wild Canadian geese flying over Queen Street earlier this morning, so I can vouch for the accuracy of the depiction.

I’ve written a piece about the history of the Eaton Centre Geese before here

Turning round, there’s a rather fine bridge connecting the Eaton Centre to the now-defunct Hudson’s Bay building…

And then there’s a brisk walk through the old building, with some remnants of its past as a department store…

…but mostly you’re channelled through corridors lined with murals by Chairman Ting, a Vancouver-based design consultancy.  Apparently they cover 27,000 square feet. Chairman Ting also designed the FIFA World Cup poster for 2026, so they’re clearly having a good year.

The latest news is that some of the old Hudson’s Bay building might be converted to self-storage. Well, better than tearing it down I suppose.

Now, I’d passed something on my way into Toronto on Saturday that I really wanted to check out, and here it is…

Yes, it’s a giant child’s head. The sculpture is called ‘Dreaming’ and it’s by Jaume Plensa, a Catalan sculptor. Apparently the 8.5 metre tall, 2.5 tonne sculpture has been here since 2020, so how I’ve missed it previously I have no idea. It’s one of those sculptures that looks fine from the front, but starts to look very strange as you walk around it….

 

Hmmm. It’s supposed to be meditative, but it feels a little creepy to me. What do you think?

Practically next door to ‘Dreaming’ is this amazing building, which deserves a blog post all to itself. So, more on the Concourse Building tomorrow….