Royal City: A Photographic History of New Westminster, 1858–1960

Ann Turner is the financial and budget manager of the University of
British Columbia Library.

A summer job cataloguing historic photographs for New Westminster’s
Irving House Historic Centre 20 years ago started heritage planner Jim
Wolf on the project that created this outstanding visual history of his
city. He discovered that New Westminster had been home to many
professional photographers over the course of its life and that their
studios (listed in an appendix) had captured on film virtually every
newsworthy event that took place there. Their surviving work offered a
unique record of the city’s history.

As Wolf researched the subjects of the photographs, he collected
contemporary newspaper accounts of the events depicted in them. Further
research in city and provincial archives, and the personal recollections
of individuals, filled in more details. Organized into a cohesive
chronological narrative, all of this material enables the reader to
track the city’s development systematically through the more than 250
archival photographs reproduced in this album and to compare its
historic buildings and streetscapes with those of the present.