Echoes of Empire: Victoria and Its Remarkable Buildings

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Behind the polite tea-party facade of Victoria, B.C., romps a robust
history packed with brassy politicians, eccentric merchants, and pompous
bureaucrats. Victoria was and remains a government town, yet it has also
been home to thousands of unwashed gold-rush immigrants. It was a place
both of pretensions and of raw frontier simplicity. All these elements
from Victoria’s colorful past compete with its architecture for
attention in this lively work.

The underlying principle for the book seems to be that architecture
cannot be appreciated, or understood, in isolation from its creator,
surroundings, and usage. Robin Ward has selected dozens of interesting
buildings from a cityscape packed with distinctive architecture and for
each has provided a very enjoyable essay on its history, the people
associated with it, and the architectural highlights. The structures
included range from the ornate parliament buildings and the Victorian
castle of coal tycoon Robert Dunsmuir to the Edwardian Royal Roads
University and the famous FanTan Alley in Chinatown. A generous
selection of historic photos support the text and ease the reader back
to Victoria as it existed before the 1930s.

For residents and visitors alike, Echoes of Empire has much to offer
and will lead to

greater appreciation of this remarkable city.