Gastown

Where it sits. Gastown is Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood, a wedge of about six blocks on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, running east from Richards Street along Water and Cordova to Maple Tree Square, where Water, Powell, Alexander and Carrall converge. Waterfront Station and the SeaBus terminal sit at its western edge; the Downtown Eastside begins at its eastern one, and the transition over a single block is abrupt and worth understanding before you arrive. The North Shore mountains close the view at the end of every north-running street.

The story behind it. In September 1867 John Deighton, a Yorkshire-born riverboat pilot with a reputation for talking — hence Gassy Jack — landed at the foot of what is now Carrall Street with a barrel of whisky and, according to the founding legend, had a saloon framed within 24 hours by mill workers who wanted somewhere to drink. The shack settlement around it was surveyed as the Granville townsite in 1870, and when the Canadian Pacific Railway chose the inlet as its Pacific terminus the place was incorporated as Vancouver in April 1886. Ten weeks later, on 13 June 1886, a land-clearing fire escaped and destroyed nearly the entire city in under an hour. What stands today is the rebuild: brick and stone commercial blocks from the late 1880s through the 1900s, put up fast and profitably during the railway boom.

What you actually see. The Byrnes Block of 1886-87 at Maple Tree Square occupies the site of Deighton's saloon and is the oldest surviving building in the city. The Hotel Europe of 1909 at Powell and Alexander is a flatiron in reinforced concrete, one of the earliest in Canada, and probably the most photographed facade in the district. Behind these run Gaoler's Mews and Blood Alley, courtyards reworked during the 1970s heritage restoration into the lantern-lit cobbled alleys that now anchor every location scout's shortlist. The steam clock at Water and Cambie looks Victorian and is not: Raymond Saunders built it in 1977, drawing on the downtown district steam-heating system, and it sounds the Westminster chimes every quarter hour above a crowd that is almost always three deep. Water Street's slope, its cast-iron lamp standards and the hanging baskets are all products of the same 1970s campaign, which followed a fight over a proposed waterfront freeway that would have flattened the district; the province designated Gastown a historic area in 1971, the year of the confrontation in Maple Tree Square between police and a downtown protest that is still remembered locally as the Gastown riot. The bronze statue of Deighton that stood on a whisky barrel in Maple Tree Square from 1970 was pulled down on 14 February 2022 during the annual Women's Memorial March, and the plinth's future is part of a live conversation with the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations about whose founding story gets told here.

On screen. Metro Vancouver is one of the largest production centres in North America, and Gastown is its default period alley. The neighbourhood's brick warehouses, fire escapes, cobbles and lack of visible Canadian signage let it read as Seattle, Chicago, Boston or New York with almost no dressing, which is why it has been in near-continuous use since the 1980s. The X-Files worked its streets and alleys repeatedly during the five seasons shot in Vancouver from 1993 to 1998, and Supernatural did the same across fifteen seasons from 2005. The most instructive case for travellers is Fifty Shades of Grey (2015): the story is set in Seattle, the audience assumes Seattle, and the production shot in Vancouver, roughly 230 km north across an international border. The city very rarely plays itself, and Gastown almost never does.

Eating, drinking and the current character. Water Street's souvenir shops sit above a serious restaurant and cocktail scene concentrated on Carrall, Blood Alley and West Cordova, much of it in ground floors of heritage blocks. Independent design and outdoor-gear retail has replaced a lot of the old tourist trade. It is also a neighbourhood with visible poverty, street disorder and an ongoing overdose crisis a block or two east; that is a fact of the place rather than a warning to avoid it, but it shapes how the streets feel after dark.

Getting there and timing. Waterfront Station puts you at the west end of Water Street from the Expo and Canada Lines, the SeaBus and the West Coast Express. The district is flat but the historic sidewalks and cobbled alleys are uneven, so wheeled access varies street by street. Cruise season, from May to September, fills Water Street between mid-morning and late afternoon when ships are alongside at Canada Place. Early morning is the photographer's window: sun comes straight down the eastbound streets and the alleys are still empty.