Britannia Mine Museum

Where it sits. The Britannia Mine Museum stands at Britannia Beach on the east shore of Howe Sound, 55 km north of Vancouver and 10 km south of Squamish, directly beside Highway 99 — the Sea-to-Sky. The fjord is on one side of the road and a near-vertical mountainside on the other, and bolted to that mountainside is Mill No. 3, a twenty-storey concrete and timber concentrator stepped down the slope like a staircase for giants. It is the most arresting industrial building on the British Columbia coast and it is visible from the highway long before the exit.

The story behind it. Copper was identified in these bluffs in the late 1880s, and the Britannia Mining and Smelting Company began production in 1904. At its peak in the 1920s Britannia was the largest copper producer in the British Empire, running roughly 200 km of underground workings on dozens of levels and supporting two company towns: Britannia Beach at sea level, and Mount Sheer up the valley, reachable only by a mine railway through the mountain. Between them they housed several thousand people with their own schools, hospital, cinema and gymnasium, all of it owned by the company. The place had a hard history. A flood in 1921, when a dam on Britannia Creek gave way, killed dozens of residents in the beach townsite, and a fire in 1935 burned much of what had been rebuilt. Falling copper prices closed the mine in 1974.

The pollution story, which is the honest part. For decades after closure, acid rock drainage poured from the old adits into Howe Sound, dissolving copper, zinc and cadmium out of the exposed sulphides. Britannia Creek was for a long time the single largest point source of metal pollution in North America, and the sound below it was effectively dead water. A water treatment plant came online in 2005, capturing and neutralising the drainage; salmon returned to Britannia Creek within a few years and Howe Sound's herring, and eventually its whales, followed. The museum tells this part plainly rather than airbrushing it, which is unusual for an industrial heritage site.

What you actually do there. The museum opened in 1975 as the British Columbia Museum of Mining and reopened after a major restoration around 2010. The core of a visit is a ride on an electric mine train into a haulage tunnel, where guides demonstrate the drilling equipment of successive eras at painful volume; hearing protection is handed out and it is not a joke. Inside Mill No. 3 a sound-and-light presentation uses the building's own volume, machinery and gravity-fed geometry as its set, projecting onto the concentrating floors. Outside there is gold panning, a 235-tonne haul truck, the mine's compressor house, and exhibits on the company town, on the women who ran households on a mountainside, and on the geology of the Britannia shear zone. Mill No. 3 has been a National Historic Site since 1988, and the building's logic is worth understanding before you walk it: ore entered at the top and gravity did the rest, dropping it through crushers, ball mills and flotation cells on successive floors so that copper concentrate emerged at the bottom, ready for the wharf. Nothing about the design is decorative, which is exactly why it photographs so well.

On screen. The mill is one of the most-used industrial locations in British Columbia. Its combination of vast interior volume, tiered floors, catwalks, chutes and rust means it can play a refinery, a prison, a laboratory, a factory or an alien installation with almost no construction, and it sits 45 minutes from Vancouver's studios. It has appeared in Vancouver-shot television since the 1980s and through the long runs of The X-Files and Supernatural, as well as in features and commercials; the museum maintains its own film office and books shoots around public opening hours. Visitors sometimes recognise the mill's stepped exterior before they recognise the name.

Getting there and timing. There is no rail service; drive Highway 99 north from Vancouver in about 50 minutes, or take one of the scheduled Sea-to-Sky coaches that stop at Britannia Beach. Parking is on site. The museum runs year-round with reduced winter hours, and because the underground train, the mill show and most exhibits are under cover, it is one of the few outdoor-corridor attractions in the region that improves on a wet day. Tours run on a timed schedule, so arriving in the first hour after opening gets you the shortest wait for the train. The site is largely level and the main exhibits are accessible, including the train, though the mill interior involves stairs on some routes. Combine it with Shannon Falls and the Stawamus Chief, both a few minutes further north, for a straightforward day out of Vancouver.