Living in Downtown Victoria BC

DOWNTOWN VICTORIA HISTORY

From Fort Victoria to a Pacific Coast Capital

Downtown Victoria developed around the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Victoria, established in the 1840s on the Inner Harbour. The early settlement grew from a trading and working-harbour economy into the administrative and commercial centre of Vancouver Island and later the capital of British Columbia.

Wharf Street, Government Street, Bastion Square, Chinatown and Old Town still preserve important layers of that nineteenth-century commercial city. Warehouses, hotels, banks and merchant buildings that once served a port economy now contain restaurants, shops, offices, lofts and strata residences.

Victoria also experienced dramatic real-estate speculation before the First World War. Land values rose sharply during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the boom collapsed around 1912. Development stalled, real-estate firms disappeared and the local property market remained subdued for decades. That boom-and-bust period remains one of the more striking episodes in Victoria's development history.

By the post-war period, Downtown's role changed again as retailing, tourism, government, offices and residential development became more important. In recent decades, condominium construction has transformed the eastern and northern parts of the core, bringing a much larger permanent residential population into what had once been primarily a business, commercial and visitor district.