London Farm and Steveston's Heritage Sites

Steveston does not have a heritage district so much as a heritage scatter. The pieces are spread along a few kilometres of waterfront in Richmond BC, some of them free, some of them ticketed, one of them a working post office. People visit the cannery, take a photo of the boats, and drive home without knowing that the oldest thing on the list is sitting on Dyke Road east of the village with almost nobody in it.

That one is London Heritage Farm, and it is my favourite of them, mostly because it is slow.

London Heritage Farm

The farmhouse went up in the 1890s, built by the family the place is named for, and it sits on a rise of lawn with the south arm of the Fraser directly behind it. From the back of the property you look across at low green land, and the traffic on the water is tugs and log booms rather than anything recreational. It is a working river, not a view.

Inside, the house is furnished as a house rather than staged as an exhibit. Rooms with heavy furniture, a kitchen with the equipment that would have actually been in it, narrow stairs. It takes twenty minutes to see and is the sort of place where a volunteer will tell you something specific about a chair if you look interested for long enough. The site is run by a society and staffed by volunteers, which is the important practical detail: hours move around, especially outside summer, and the tea room upstairs is not always running. Check before you drive out if the tea is the point of your trip. When it is open it does scones and a house tea blend that you can buy in the gift shop, and I have taken more than one visiting relative there specifically because it is the opposite of everything else I show them in Richmond.

The grounds are the better half anyway. There is a herb garden, an orchard of old fruit trees, and enough lawn that in summer the place gets booked for events. Go on a weekday morning. The best twenty minutes I have spent there involved sitting on the grass doing nothing at all while a container ship's worth of nothing happened on the river.

London's Landing, just below

Walk down toward the water and you are at London's Landing, at the foot of No. 2 Road. This was a real landing once, the point where things came off boats before Steveston's harbour took over the job. Now it is a short pier, some benches, a few people fishing, and boats that are clearly used rather than displayed.

It is also a good place to pick up the South Dyke Trail, which runs along Dyke Road and connects west toward Garry Point. That walk is flatter, quieter and much less photographed than the west dyke, and on a grey afternoon it is the one I choose. There are stretches where the only sound is a diesel engine somewhere out of sight.

Britannia Shipyards

A little further west along the water is Britannia Shipyards, which is the most atmospheric site in Richmond and which deserves its own visit rather than a stop. Buildings on pilings, a boardwalk over the mud, doors open in summer so you can walk into net lofts and boatworks and the bunkhouses where cannery crews lived. Nothing has been prettied up much. The wood looks like wood that has been in salt air for a century.

Murakami House is on that site, and it is the building I would send anyone to first. It interprets one Japanese Canadian family's life on the shipyard, which makes the history specific instead of general, and the specificity is what lands.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery

At the west end of Moncton Street, the cannery is the big ticketed one, run as a national historic site. It is the only stop on this list where you should expect to pay admission and where you should expect the visit to take real time. The canning line is intact, the herring reduction plant exhibit is genuinely unsettling in a good way, and the whole building is cold year-round, which is not an accident. Dress like you are going into a fridge, because you are.

If you are choosing between the cannery and Britannia and you only have one afternoon, I would say the cannery if you want it explained to you and Britannia if you would rather feel it. That is a preference, not a verdict.

Moncton Street: museum, post office, tram

The village end of the heritage list is easy to walk in an hour. The Steveston Museum occupies the old bank building on Moncton Street, and there is still a post office counter operating inside it, which is a strange and excellent thing. People come in to mail parcels while other people look at exhibits three metres away. Next to it is the former Japanese fishermen's benevolent society building, and the small square between them is where a lot of the village's events end up.

A short walk along the same street is the restored interurban tram car in its own purpose-built shed. Free to walk into, last I was there, and staffed by people who are delighted that you asked. Kids like the tram far more than they like the museum, and the tram takes ten minutes, so do it second and use it as the reward.

The part that is harder to see

Steveston's heritage sites are mostly buildings, and the thing that matters most about this village's history is an absence. Before the Second World War this was one of the largest Japanese Canadian communities in the country, built around the fishery. In 1942 those families were forcibly removed from the coast and their property, including their boats, was taken from them. Many never came back. The ones who did came back to a village that had gone on without them.

You can walk past most of the physical evidence without registering it. Murakami House at Britannia is the clearest place to encounter it, and the interpretive material at the cannery and the museum covers it too. If you are bringing someone through Steveston for the first time, this is the through-line worth giving them. Otherwise the whole thing reads as boats and fish and a nice boardwalk, which is about a third of the story.

How I would string it into one day

Start east and work west, because the village is where you want to end up when you are hungry. London Farm first, when it is quiet. Then London's Landing and as much of the south dyke as you feel like. Then Britannia. Then the cannery if you have the energy, or the museum and tram if you do not, and then Moncton Street.

• Parking is easiest in the morning and briefly awful between noon and about three on summer weekends.
• Two of these sites keep volunteer or seasonal hours. Check the day before rather than the hour before.
• The whole route is flat. All of it is doable on a bike, and the bike solves the parking.

Eating between stops

Breakfast first if you are starting early. Cannery Cafe is where I send people who want a plate of eggs without a lineup philosophy attached to it. Diplomat Bakery and Steveston Bakery are both worth a stop for something to carry, and I use them for different things: one for bread, one for the case at the front.

For lunch or after, The Steveston Cafe & Hotel is a heritage stop in its own right and a perfectly good sandwich, Moncton Pizzeria does the job when you have a kid who has run out of patience for old buildings, and Blue Canoe Waterfront Restaurant is the one with the harbour view if the day has turned into an occasion. If you are done walking and not driving, Britannia Brewing Steveston is a short stagger from most of this.

And if you are in the village anyway with an hour to kill, Steveston Barbers is the kind of shop a village built on heritage ought to have, and does.