A brickworks that supplied half of Victorian Toronto, abandoned, flooded, and turned into a park with a farmers' market in the kilns.
The Don Valley Brick Works operated from 1889 to 1984 and made a very large proportion of the bricks that Toronto is built from — Massey Hall, Casa Loma, Osgoode Hall and thousands of houses.
The clay came from a quarry cut directly into the valley wall, and that cut exposed something unexpected.
The North Slope
The quarry face revealed a geological section covering around 120,000 years, including interglacial deposits with the fossils of plants and animals — including a giant beaver and a bison — indicating a period when Toronto’s climate resembled that of the modern southern United States.
It is one of the most important Pleistocene sites in North America and is protected. Interpretive panels explain the strata, which are visible from the paths.
After the works closed
The site was abandoned, flooded, and used by trespassers and film crews. In the 1990s the quarry was rewilded into a series of ponds and wetlands, and from 2010 the charity Evergreen converted the industrial buildings into an environmental centre.
The conversion is deliberately incomplete — the buildings retain their machinery, graffiti and weathering, and several are open-air. It has won a good deal of architectural attention and is a genuinely unusual piece of adaptive reuse.
What is there
The Saturday farmers’ market, year-round, with around seventy vendors — produce, bread, cheese, prepared food. In winter it moves into the kiln building.
The quarry garden and ponds, with boardwalks and birdlife, and paths up the valley wall to a lookout with a view of the downtown skyline framed by trees.
Children’s programmes, a garden centre, a skating trail in winter, and Café Belong, a restaurant using Ontario produce.
Cycling and walking — the site connects to the Don Valley trail network, which runs from the lake up through the ravine system.
The ravines
Worth understanding while you are here: Toronto has an enormous ravine system — around 300 kilometres of wooded valleys cut by creeks, running through the middle of the city. They were largely spared development because they flood, and after Hurricane Hazel in 1954 killed 81 people, building in the floodplains was banned outright.
The result is a city with genuine forest inside it. The Brick Works is one of the easiest ways in.
Practicalities
Free to enter the site; some programmes are ticketed.
A free shuttle bus runs from Broadview station on Line 2, roughly every half hour at weekends and less often midweek — check the timetable, as walking in from the road is unpleasant.
Parking is paid and fills on Saturdays.
More History
The Distillery District
Forty-odd Victorian industrial buildings from what was once the largest distillery in the world, pedestrianised and full of galleries.
Old Town and St Lawrence Hall
The ten blocks that were the whole of York in 1793, with a Victorian assembly hall where Jenny Lind sang and abolitionists met.