This book celebrates Victoria’s neighbourhoods and surrounding region. It is not a book of facts, but rather a gentle stroll through our region during which we pause, observe, ponder, and have what I like to call “a little think” on the various features and personalities of these areas and how these features not only create a neighbourhood, and therefore our city, but also how they make us feel, how they “move” us.
Our little thinks can include marvelling at the charming, hard-working winter wren who builds a vast array of tiny reed-and-grass houses hoping to attract a female, or experiencing the rowdy fun of “Uke Night,” when fifty people get together to play their ukuleles, or wondering why certain public art makes us stop and gaze in awe, or asking which is lovelier, a man-made environment or a natural one. These and many other features are explored here as we amble through our city.
As we consider our neighbourhoods’ diverse personalities, we will see the many subtle elements that bind us all together—things such as the poems by our Poet Laureate, Janet Rogers (two of which are in this book); the thousand-plus hanging flower baskets that line our downtown streets; the Netherlands carillon that fills the Inner Harbour with joyful music on a bleak and dismal winter’s day; and the corner stores, always there, with their overflowing buckets of colourful bouquets under their awnings.
I hope the observations and thoughts in this book, along with Robert’s lovely paintings, bring you many little thinks and much joy about Victoria and our place within it.