Nine Surrey-area buildings are featured in a new “Exploring Vancouver” book written by Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, longtime chroniclers of the region.
Harbour Publishing’s fifth-edition guidebook offers 400-plus entries and 10 self-guided tours highlighting “significant buildings from all eras in the city and its metro region, and feature new projects that transform the skyline more radically than ever before.”
Starting deep into the book, on page 329, the Surrey-area buildings profiled are St. Helen’s Anglican Church, Surrey City Hall/Civic Plaza, Surrey City Centre Library, Simon Fraser University Sustainable Energy and Engineering Building, Coast Capital Savings headquarters, Canada Revenue Agency, Surrey Memorial Hospital Emergency Department and Critical Care Tower, BC RCMP Divisional Headquarters and Surrey Nature Centre/Green Timbers Urban Forest.
Oldest of the structures is St. Helen’s church, built in 1911 on the Old Yale Wagon Road (now Old Yale Road, at 128 Street), on land gifted by Surrey pioneer Walter James Walker. “The site afforded a panorama across to New Westminster and up and down the river,” the authors note. “Navigation was aided by a beacon once housed in the church bell tower’s octagonal turret.”
Surrey City Hall is noted for its geothermal district energy system with 406 boreholes, each 76 metres deep (“the largest of its kind in Canada”), and the adjacent library “is like an auditorium with a sweeping spiral of galleries — a theatre of books, digital learning and community gathering.”
On King George Boulevard, the cruise ship-like Coast Capital building is described as “dynamic” and the first of the complexes at the transit hub there.
Located across the street, the Canada Revenue Agency building, opened in 1999, “drifted into view like a mirage of modernism, bringing sophistication to the strip mall zone that was King George Highway,” since rebranded Boulevard.
The RCMP’s provincial HQ, meantime, is a noted as a “fully integrated post-disaster facility delivered as a public-private partnership by the federal government and a consortium led by Bouygues Building Canada.”
Also at Green Timbers, Surrey Nature Centre is featured as a resource for education and recreation in the forest, created in 1930 after the last old-growth trees were logged. “The Sky Room interpretive space is in a smartly repurposed instrustrial shed,” the authors note. “The centre includes a stand of trees from the inaugural planting and an associated arboretum.”
In paperback, “Exploring Vancouver: Ten Tours of the City and its Buildings” is priced at $29.95 on harbourpublishing.com.
tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com
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