Visit to the Brickworks

Don Valley Brickworks had closed years ago and developers were just about ready to move in when some good Canadian citizens teamed up to save the area for the good folk of Toronto. I have been there a few times before, but this time I could see the tremendous advances they made for realising the dream of not only restoring the outside and inside spaces, but establish an Environmental Education Centre that they could be proud of.

The enormous clay pits and the quarry became a lovely outside space, a park with lake, walkways, water lilies, birds, swamp, hills and valleys. There are spaces for picnics and elsewhere playgrounds. Inside they have an environmental centre with educational space, garden centre, cafe, in winter a skating rink, a large space for parties and lots of workshops. We chatted to a guy who was working with recycled old timber, including ancient, very hard yellow pine and douglas fir. Callum ran around for a while, took exception to his Dad and Grandad stopping him eating poisonous berries, then forgot all about it and played in the sand somewhere. We had our picnic lunch, he ran around a bit more and then we went home. He dropped off en route home in the car and carried on sleeping for another 2 and half hours.

After waking up he went to play outside, sometimes on his own at other times with his little friends. We all had a lovely tea and he went to bed peacefully after watching his favourite cartoons on the TV.