Giving new life to old buildings
Another of Victoria’s historic buildings is getting a new life, joining a promising list that will help preserve the city’s character. Matt Phillips, the founder of Phillips Brewing, has bought the brick building on lower Discovery Street that, until recently, housed Sports Traders. It will become his brewery’s distribution centre.
The building was built in 1901 to serve as a depot and storage shed for the B.C. Electric Railway Company, which ran a streetcar network in Victoria.
It was designed by Francis Mawson Rattenbury, who was well-known for being the architect responsible for some of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, including the Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel.
The old depot is not only a historic building with what Phillips calls good “bones,” it also abuts his brewery, so he will be able to bring his operations together in one location.
The brewery will use about 16,000 square feet, leaving in place the other tenants: Ingredients Cafe and Community Market, the Duke Saloon and Victoria Gymnastics.
On the northern edge of the area known as Old Town, it’s one of the buildings that live on despite pressures to flatten them and build something new. One of the bestknown and longest-serving is just a stone’s throw away: the Capital Iron building.
Longtime Victoria residents remember the thrill of descending into the lower reaches of Capital Iron, which disassembled ships, in search of nautical treasures that were taken from vessels of all kinds. Although ships are no longer broken up beside the water, the building houses a thriving retail business.
Not far away, other buildings are being preserved. Chris Lefevre, well-known for preserving historic structures, is buying from B.C. Hydro the 20,000-square-foot Powerhouse building close to Rock Bay, as well as a threestorey brick building at 502 Pembroke St., across the road from Phillips’ property.
These are not the homes, hotels, apartment buildings or offices that we often think of when we talk about preserving historic structures. They are industrial or commercial. But even though people didn’t live in them, their distinctive designs and long histories make them part of Victoria’s characteristic cityscape.
As with other buildings farther south in Old Town, we can’t preserve them in amber. The city must live and change.
But as Lefevre and others have shown, between tearing down a building and freezing it in time, there is a lot of room for creative preservation.
Two old houses were carefully barged from the block behind the Parliament Buildings to stand across Dallas Road from Ogden Point. From the outside, they would look very familiar to their long-ago owners. On the inside, the old has been made new, and the water views have made the homes highly desirable. In other cities or situations, those homes might have been seen as tear-downs, but in Victoria, they are ready for another century.
Transforming a house, even if it means a complicated move is needed, is much better than seeing those classic houses loaded onto barges and floated away to grace some other town or city. We all lose when our heritage is tossed aside.
For the buildings of Old Town, similar restoration and preservation work ensures that, behind those classic facades, familiar structures will hum with activity — as they have done for generations.