Living in Vic West, Victoria BC

Vic West is part of the traditional territory of the Lekwungen-speaking Songhees people. After the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Victoria in 1843, the Songhees moved their village across the harbour to the shoreline that is now Vic West. It remained there until 1911, when, after lengthy negotiations, the reserve was relocated to Esquimalt and the land was opened to industry.

Prominent families built homes here in the 1880s and 1890s. James Dunsmuir, son of coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, built his Burleith estate in 1892 on about 20 acres. It was subdivided after he became Lieutenant Governor in 1906, and the house was destroyed by fire in 1931, though the name lives on in Burleith Park. Roslyn, built in 1890 on Catherine Street for Andrew Gray of the Albion Iron Works, still stands, and General Sir Arthur Currie lived in Vic West before the First World War.

Most of the neighbourhood was built between the 1890s and 1913. The No. 5 streetcar reached Craigflower Road in 1906 and set off a boom in house building; buses replaced it in 1947. Residents worked for the E&N and BC Electric railways, shipbuilders, lumber mills, breweries, machine shops and foundries.

Vic West was also the scene of Canada's deadliest streetcar accident. On May 26, 1896, a streetcar crowded with 143 passengers on their way to the Queen's birthday celebrations, which included a mock naval battle at Esquimalt, broke through the Point Ellice Bridge, and 55 people died. Today's Bay Street Bridge crosses at the same spot.

The Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway's roundhouse on Esquimalt Road was completed in October 1913. It was designated a National Historic Site in 1992, and Parks Canada describes it as the most intact steam-locomotive servicing facility in western Canada.

The original Johnson Street Bridge, known locally as the Blue Bridge, opened in January 1924. Its replacement, a single-leaf rolling bascule bridge with separated walking and cycling lanes, opened on March 31, 2018. Industry gradually left the waterfront in the late 20th century, and condominium development along the harbour from the late 1980s began the transformation that continues today at Dockside Green, Bayview and the Railyards.