Map 13. After leaving Woodstock, Simcoe’s Dundas Street, a.k.a. Oxford County Road 2, heads west-south-west for 55 km in a dead straight line towards London. The road’s course was determined by its endpoint, namely the Forks in the Thames River (see Map 15 and #186 below). The only settlement of any size on the way is Thamesford, roughly halfway between the cities. West of Thamesford, Oxford 2 assumes its old name, becoming Dundas Street West as far as the border between Oxford and Middlesex Counties, then plain Dundas Street to its end at the Forks in downtown London. But from Woodstock to Thamesford, the road has for no discernible reason recently been reclassified as Oxford Road 68. As the map suggests, in this area Dundas Street was the baseline for the road system north of the Thames, and evidently determined the course of what is now the CPKC rail line too.
163. We’re about to leave the City of Woodstock and, just before the CPKC rail crossing, enter rural Zorra Township. The exotic name dates back to 1819. What’s its derivation?
Gardiner explains that a former Lieutenant-Governor “had a fancy for bestowing Spanish names” (5): “Zorra is the Spanish word for a female fox; a strumpet; a sly, crafty person. Some prefer to derive this name from Zorah, the birthplace of Samson, mentioned in Judges xiii. 2. But it probably got its name from Sir Peregrine Maitland, in the same way as Lobo in Middlesex” (305). G.H. Armstrong elaborates: “Zorra is the Spanish word for female fox, a crafty person. It was, doubtless, suggested by Lieut-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, 1818-28, who gave military service in Spain under Wellington before receiving his appointment to Upper Canada” (311) And Wintemberg concludes: “Governor Maitland, or whoever named the older townships, must certainly have had a penchant for Spanish names. Thus, beside Zorra, we have Oro (gold), Lobo (wolf), Rama (branch), Mariposa (butterfly), Mono (monkey), Oso (bear), and Sombra (shadow or shade)” (264). Of course, none of this explains why Maitland chose the Spanish word for a vixen, and by extension for a devious, hot-tempered, sexually assertive woman, for this area that was settled chiefly by dour Scots. Might he have had fond memories of a zorra he encountered on his Iberian adventures during the Napoleonic Wars?
164. Thamesford (pop. 2,600) in Zorra Township, Oxford County, is the only place of any size on Dundas Street between Woodstock and London. Just east of the village, Dundas Street crosses the Middle Thames River. That’s the parapet of the bridge at centre left. From this point Dundas Street retains that name all the way to the Forks in London. Soon we’ll leave Oxford and enter the Township of Thames Centre in Middlesex* County.
*The original Middlesex was a small county north of the River Thames in southeast England, one that has long been swallowed up by Greater London. The placename indicates territory settled by “middle” Saxons, i.e., those dwelling between the Saxons in the west (Wessex) and those in the east (Essex). Middlesex County here in Ontario was so named in 1796, and currently consists of seven rural townships.
165. The Middle Thames is a tributary of the main branch of the Thames, rising near Embro and joining the main branch west of Ingersoll.
(Top) The view upstream from the Dundas Street West Bridge, towards a dam that creates a small lake behind it.
(Bottom) That’s a beaver swimming from left to right across the river.
166. The eastern border of the City of London on Dundas Street is about 13 km from the Forks. London is the seat of Middlesex County, though as a single-tier municipality, it’s administered separately. London’s metropolitan area, population about 600,000, is the eleventh largest in Canada, and one of the fastest-growing. If lower-tier municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area like Mississauga and Brampton are excluded, London is the fourth biggest city in Ontario after Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton. It’s now also the largest urban centre on the original stretch of Dundas Street, and of the dozen Londons in North America, it’s the most populous by far.
How London, Ontario came to exist is a complicated story, so here’s a greatly simplified version. Lt.-Gov. Simcoe identified the Forks in 1793 as his preferred site for the capital of Upper Canada and was responsible for the names “London” and “Thames.” A Crown Reserve of 3,850 acres was set aside at the Forks for the future capital. Dundas Street some time after 1793 was extended to the Forks, though the Detroit Path remained the preferred route to the west. London Township remained very thinly settled, while in 1796 York (now Toronto) was chosen as the capital of Upper Canada. In that same year, by the London Township Treaty the Crown purchased the land north of the Thames from the Chippewa Nation for 1,200 pounds. Aside from scattered settlement around it, little happened in the Crown Reserve until 1826, when in the village of Vittoria miles to the southeast the courthouse of the vast London District burned down. A more central site for its replacement was considered by a committee, and the still vacant Crown Reserve at the Forks of the Thames was chosen. An impressive new courthouse (see #185 below) was built and quickly a settlement, London in embryo, began to accumulate around it. London had a population of 133 in 1827, was incorporated as a town (pop. 2,078) in 1841, and became a city (pop. 12,000) in 1855.
Map 14 (top) shows London north of the Thames from its eastern edge to the Forks. Dundas Street, the central latitudinal street, is named.
Map 15 (bottom) shows downtown London in more detail. BB = Blackfriars Bridge; BH = Banting House Museum; CH = Old Court House; CM = Covent Garden Market; DB = Dominion Public Building; EH = Eldon House; KB = Kensington Bridge; ML = Museum London; OJ = Ontario Court of Justice; QB = Queens Bridge. There are several surface P lots, all fairly costly. But there are also a few spots in Dundas Place (see #169 below), good for one hour free P during weekdays and unrestricted P on weekends and holidays.
167. If you enter London from the east, or if diabetes has touched your life, consider pausing here, at Adelaide and Queens Ave., one block north of Dundas Street. It’s the Banting House National Historic Site at 442 Adelaide Street North.
Frederick Banting, who with his student Charles Best pioneered the isolation and extraction of insulin to effectively treat diabetes, lived here briefly between July 1920 and May 1921. Here he set up a general practice and taught at the University of Western Ontario. But he soon returned to the University of Toronto, as he was unable to find laboratory space and funding in London to continue his research on insulin.
This house, where Banting awakened one morning with a clear idea of what needed to be done to isolate insulin, is a museum of the history of insulin and contains artworks by Banting, an accomplished amateur painter. The statue (1989) above by John Miecznikowski (US/Canada, 1943-2021) depicts Banting aged 29, at the moment he first wrote down his great idea. Before Banting, Type 1 diabetes, usually of genetic origin, was fatal, so his research has helped save millions of lives.
In 1923, Banting became the youngest ever, and first Canadian, recipient of a Nobel Prize, in his case for Physiology/Medicine. Banting had a distinguished military record in both World Wars. He died in a plane crash in Newfoundland in 1941 while serving as a Flight Lieutenant in the RCAF.
Owned and operated by Diabetes Canada, Banting House is open Tuesday to Sunday; hours and entrance fees vary. There’s ample paid P onsite.
168. Three historical views of Dundas Street suggesting its centrality and importance to the development of downtown London.
(Top) Looking west from Wellington Street to the old Court House (the castellated building behind the inn sign, upper left; see #185 below). From an 1842 sketch by Lady Eveline-Marie Alexander, wife of a locally-based military officer.
(Middle) Following many destructive fires including the Great Fire of 1845, buildings downtown were required to be built with brick or stone. Dundas Street, here viewed west of Talbot Street, by 1875 had become lined on both sides with three-storey Georgian-style commercial buildings built mainly of white brick.
(Bottom) Looking east from Richmond Street, turn of the twentieth century. Electric streetcars began running on Dundas Street in 1895, when the population of the city was 34,429.
169. (Top) Dundas Street today from Richmond Street looking east.
(Middle) “Dundas Place,” as these four blocks are branded, has its own calendar of events.
(Bottom) The Fanshawe block west of Richmond boasts colourful “Dundas Place” signs. Dundas Street here is a relaxed downtown location that welcomes, rather than tolerates pedestrians.
Dundas is now “London’s Most Exciting Street.” The four blocks between Wellington and Ridout Streets just east of the Forks have been turned into a flexible space that has seen a great reduction in traffic and a consequent increase in footfall. These blocks have recently been paved with 700,000 bricks, incorporating a wavy central pattern that alludes to the importance of rivers in London’s development. Sidewalks have been widened and curbs removed, trees planted, and planters filled with greenery. Spaces in front of stores can be easily used as patios.
What’s immediately apparent is that this city positively celebrates its Dundas Street. Contrast this with Toronto, where thanks to poor research or mischief, “Dundas” has become a dirty word (see my Introduction to this photoblog).
170. Three blocks of Dundas Place are lined with independent stores, some quite … colourful!
171. The westernmost block of Dundas Place between Ridout and Talbot has no stores, and is designated the “Event Block,” which can be closed off from traffic for street performances.
London is not a particularly beautiful city, but it is one with a vision of what makes a lively urban centre and is working hard to that end. Dundas Street was crucial to the city’s founding and development, even if Simcoe’s plan to found his capital of Upper Canada here was never implemented and the settlement of London had to wait three decades after his departure from North America.
The western end of historic Dundas Street contrasts very favourably with the eastern end in Dundas, which currently boasts a huge, empty, weed-bordered lot on the north side (see Part 1, #34).
172. A brief architectural excursion downtown.
The Dominion Public Building (1936) at 457 Richmond Street, two blocks north of Dundas. This building was a product of the Public Works Construction Act aimed at getting people to work during the Great Depression. The exterior is concrete block finished with limestone, with dark granite framing the doorways. It’s in Art Deco style, not one I warm to, but it has a certain monumental presence. At the time of its construction it stood as an assertion of Canadian nationalism, and of the determination of the federal government to support workers through hard economic conditions. It’s still occupied by federal agencies: Service Canada, Health Canada, and Public Works and Government Services. It’s a finer building than most of those thrown up since in downtown London …
173. … such as this brutalist horror, the Ontario Court of Justice (1974) at 80 Dundas Street that replaced the old Court House (see #185 below). Faced with raw concrete (béton brut) with windows that don’t open, it seems to delight in its own ugliness. It has weathered to this ugly brown-grey colour and looks more like a provincial HQ of George Orwell’s Ministry of Love than a place where justice is dispensed.
174. A brief excursion north of the Forks.
Eldon House (1834), overlooking the North Thames at 481 Ridout Street North, is London’s oldest surviving dwelling. A period museum and garden, it is currently under rehabilitation, like almost everything else at the Forks. In Regency style, it was built for John Harris (1782-1850), the first Treasurer of the London District, his wife Amelia, and their ten surviving children. The Harris descendants occupied it for several generations, then donated it to the City of London in 1959. It contains family heirlooms and is open for self-guided tours.
Upper Canada in the 1830s was a small world. John Harris happened to be in Niagara in 1837 when the rebel William Lyon MacKenzie and his sympathizers were using the US steamboat Caroline to supply their redoubt on Navy Island in the Niagara River. Harris of London, together with Capt. Andrew Drew of Woodstock (see #157 above), was in the group of Canadian militia under Col. Allan MacNab of Hamilton who successfully plotted to seize the Caroline, unmoor it, and send it to its doom over Niagara Falls (see Campbell, “Settlement,” 16). This incident outraged the United States, as it involved the capture of an American vessel on US territory and its destruction. Harris’s participation in the Caroline affair was long kept secret: as a half-pay naval officer he was not supposed to be on active service!
175. (Top) The Blackfriars Bridge, about 800 m north of Dundas along Ridout North, spans the North Thames above the Forks. It’s a wrought-iron bowstring arch through truss bridge 65 m long, and carries vehicular traffic in one direction (east) across the river. The oldest working wrought-iron bridge in North America, it was built by a local contractor for the Wrought-Iron Bridge Co. of Canton, Ohio in 1875 and was extensively rehabilitated in 2018. It’s an unusual, very attractive bridge, in a quasi-rural setting not far from the centre of the city.
(Middle) The view upstream from Blackfriars Bridge. The high West London Dyke on the west bank of the river protects the low-lying west bank from flooding. Visible upriver are the road bridge on Oxford Street and the rail bridge just north of that.
(Bottom) The West London Dyke, the North Thames River, and the riverside trail from the east bank just above the Forks. The temporary fencing is part of the major reconstructions taking place hereabout.
176. Street art is a good way of livening up the drabness of contemporary architecture.
(Top) This mural is in Market Lane, the alley between Dundas Street and the Covent Garden market. It’s by Meaghan Claire Kehoe and it includes local fauna: barn swallows, an eastern screech owl, and a monarch butterfly.
(Bottom) A mural (2023) by Kevin Ledo on a blank wall on Canada Life Place (formerly Budweiser Gardens), the arena whose flank takes up the entire east side of the Event Block on Dundas Street. It’s of country music legend Johnny Cash proposing to June Carter, which he did on stage here in London in 1968.
177. The Covent Garden Market at 10 King Street is reached from Market Lane in the Fanshawe Block of Dundas Place. It was established in 1845, while the current indoor market hall was built in 1999. It prides itself in selling locally grown farm produce, and all the vendors are local too. A fine central covered market like this, open all year, is a key, perhaps the most important one, to maintaining a lively downtown.
178. Before we get to the Forks, this building at 421 Ridout Street North intervenes. It’s Museum London, the premier art and historical museum in the city. The building was designed by Raymond Moriyama, best known for the now permanently shuttered Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. While the sudden closure of that building by the Ontario Government caused outrage, that wasn’t because of any particular public affection for its architecture. This edifice, I suspect, will be treated no less brutally when the time for its replacement comes around.
(Top) Its façade is undistinguished, resembling a suburban transit station. And what’s the point of that forward slash after London, unless inadvertently to suggest a certain incoherence in the current institutional administration?
(Bottom) The view from Dundas Street. The building is much larger than it looks from the front, as there are several parallel iterations of its train-shed-like structure.
179. Museum London is open Tuesdays to Sundays 11:00 am – 5:00 pm, and to 8:00 pm on Thursday evenings. Admission is by donation.
The main level is more colourful than the exterior, though devoid of art and artifacts. The public areas are taken up with a foyer, a gift shop, a café …
180. … and an atrium where these designs were being applied to the wall. The key to the museum’s current exhibition policy? Cover the walls with repetitive two-dimensional images, so that décor substitutes for display.
181. The Lawson Family Gallery on the Lower Floor is the local-historical part of the Museum. There is a worthy, but weak attempt to trace the history of the London area from precolonial times. This display panel on Pre-Contact exemplifies the problem. I defy anyone who has no specialist knowledge of Native history and culture to make sense of what’s on this placard and how it relates to where we’re standing.
The history of London, a relatively big city, is potentially interesting to a large body of people. But Museum London’s local history section compares poorly to the one in the Woodstock Museum (see #144-148 above). That much smaller city has assembled displays that make its relatively obscure history immediately appealing to the uninformed observer.
181. On the second level, once again the décor protocol prevails.
(Top) Here are nine oils by some of Canada’s greatest painters: Frederick Varley, Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Emily Carr, Arthur Lismer, A.J. Casson, et al. But despite vast available expanses of wall space on Level 2, they’re all bunched together, as though they’re a job lot for sale at a knockdown price. They don’t even have individual labels.
(Bottom) Huge areas of wall space are taken up with displays like this one on vintage tools. Photographs dominate at eye level, while the frivolously-arranged artifacts themselves above play second fiddle.
182. The only successfully displayed high-quality artwork in the entire museum when I visited was this life-size mixed-media installation Nativity Scene (2017) by the brilliant provocateur Kent Monkman (b. 1975) of the Fisher River Cree Nation. Three-dimensional, it cannot be reduced to décor.
183. For all its deficiencies, Museum London does have a great location. And on the south side (and only on that side) there are large windows that give a panoramic view over the two bridges over the North Thames near the Forks.
(Top) At left, the Kensington Bridge (a.k.a. Dundas Street Bridge) (one way eastbound) and at right, the Queens Avenue Bridge (one way westbound) over the North Thames. Riverside Drive stretches into the distance on the west side of the river. Construction works litter the area.
The Kensington Bridge, a 95 m long three-span Warren pony truss bridge, was built by the Hamilton Bridge Co. in 1930. It’s not in great shape, but before it can be closed for rehabilitation, work needs to be done to the more recent Queen’s Avenue Bridge (1973) just north of it, so it can temporarily handle two-way traffic. The Queens Bridge is a three-span steel plate girder bridge with an exposed concrete deck.
(Bottom) The crocodile on the half-closed Queens Bridge is composed of young people on a fundraising walk for cancer research.
184. The spot where London began, on the riverbank overlooking the Forks. This spot determined the course from Woodstock of the westernmost section of the original Dundas Street.
(Top) The façade of the former Middlesex County Court House (begun 1827) at 399 Ridout Street North, since 1955 a National Historic Site of Canada. The building, surely inspired by the Medieval Revival popularized by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, was modelled partly on 12th-century Malahide Castle in Ireland.
In 1825, Vittoria, a village far to the southeast of here, was the seat of the barely settled London District, which until its abolition in 1850 included the current counties of Oxford, Norfolk, and Middlesex as well as a huge territory stretching north to the shore of Lake Huron. The District Courthouse in Vittoria burned down in 1825, and the opportunity was taken to move it here to what is now London, a more central location at the western terminus of Simcoe’s Dundas Street.
(Middle) The rather handsome brown brick building (1846) was the District Jail. The old County Courthouse was replaced by the building at #173 above, of which the less said the better. The old Courthouse and Jail were sold to York Developments for $30M in 2019, and their fate is unclear. Towering over them are the two Renaissance apartment towers, which, I fear, add little to the historical ambiance of this site.
(Bottom) This plaque on the corner of Dundas and Ridout Streets gives a potted history of the city. “York,” of course, is Toronto, which Simcoe was persuaded to choose over his preferred site for the capital of what would eventually become Canada’s most populous province.
In 1834 the citizens of York changed its Simcoe-picked name to “Toronto” to avoid confusion with the rising US metropolis on the Hudson – a wise decision in my view. I wonder if this London has been held back in some way by its retention of the same name as another great world city?
185. (Top) At last, this is the actual Forks, as viewed from the Kensington Bridge, the one taking Dundas Street over the North Thames River. The North Thames here in the foreground flows into the main Thames, which serves as the crosspiece to the T formed by this junction and which flows from left to right. During my visit, there were extensive construction works closing the trails that line the North Thames, making it impossible to get down to the riverside … (Bottom) … however, this gentleman, whose jacket is the tiny spot of red in the top image, has managed to access the south bank of the main Thames at the point where the leg and cap of the T meet, and is nonchalantly fishing.
In the next episode, I return to Dundas and begin to trace Dundas Street’s subsequent eastbound course from there to Toronto.
Part 7 coming soon.
Holmström Ruddick 