The Kingsway

Most Toronto neighbourhoods grew street by street, owner by owner. The Kingsway was designed, in one piece, by one man who wanted it to look like England.

Between 1906 and 1912, a lawyer named Robert Home Smith assembled roughly three thousand acres along the Humber River. His pitch was four words long, and it still describes the place: a bit of England far from England. The first two houses went up on The Kingsway in 1924. Building carried on until 1947, and when it stopped there were about six hundred and seventy homes.

What makes the neighbourhood hold its value is what Home Smith wrote into the deeds. For thirty years, binding on every buyer, the rules were these: your home had to be designed by an architect and approved by his office. Exteriors were limited to stone, stucco, or brick. Tudor and Old English were strongly preferred. No semi-detached houses, no multi-unit buildings. There were minimum sizes. And you could not remove a tree without permission.

A century later you are still looking at the result. The canopy is mature because nobody was allowed to cut it. The streetscape is consistent because a single office signed off on every elevation. Rough Humber River stone, half-timbering with red brick nogging, leaded and stained glass, steeply pitched roofs. The streets curve because they follow the contours of the land rather than a surveyor's grid, which is English garden suburb planning, and it is why you can get pleasantly lost in here.

Two details I like telling clients. The Kingsway itself is one hundred feet wide, where the standard Toronto street is sixty-six. Home Smith planned an electric railway down the middle of it, which was never built, so the neighbourhood inherited an unusually generous boulevard for nothing. And it was the first paved subdivision street in Etobicoke, because he designed the whole place for the automobile before most of his buyers owned one.

The streets are not equal, and the difference is money

This is the single most useful thing I can tell a buyer here. The Kingsway sits on a ridge between two watercourses, the Humber to the east and Mimico Creek to the west. Home Smith made the lots on the east side of Kingsway Crescent deliberately larger, because they look over the Humber valley, and he intended grander houses on them.

Then the market crashed in 1929, and around 1930 he cut lot sizes by roughly forty percent to keep selling. So the lot you are standing on depends on which year its block was released. Two houses with a nearly identical floor plan can sit hundreds of thousands of dollars apart because one backs onto the ravine and the other does not. No listing photograph shows you that. Walking the street does.

Schools

Families move here for these, and the catchment lines cut right through the neighbourhood, so confirm your specific address with the board rather than trusting a listing.

• Lambton-Kingsway Junior Middle School, 525 Prince Edward Drive, junior kindergarten through grade eight. This is the one people move for.
• Islington Junior Middle School serves the western portion.
• Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, 86 Montgomery Road, founded 1928. The original entrance is Art Deco and worth a look.
• Our Lady of Sorrows, the Catholic school, which opened in 1942 as Etobicoke's first permanent Catholic school.
• Kingsway College School, private, junior kindergarten through grade twelve.
• Etobicoke School of the Arts, 675 Royal York Road, entry by audition rather than address. Canada's oldest free-standing arts high school.

Getting downtown

Two stations on Line 2 serve the neighbourhood. Royal York sits just north of Bloor and has been fully accessible since 2019. Old Mill is the more interesting one, partly elevated over the Humber River, and unlike anything else on the system.

From Royal York you are looking at roughly twenty minutes to Bloor-Yonge, then another five to eight down to Union. Most people here call it half an hour door to desk, which matches what my clients report. By car you have Bloor and Dundas running east and west, and the Gardiner via Islington or Park Lawn.

One thing to know if you are buying near Old Mill: the station is in the middle of an elevator and accessibility build that runs to around the end of 2028. That means construction hoarding, noise, and a closed sidewalk near 2662 Bloor West for a while yet.

The Bloor Street strip, and the Old Mill

The retail spine runs along Bloor Street West between Montgomery Road and Prince Edward Drive North. It is a proper walkable high street with well over a hundred businesses, and it is why people who move here stop driving to malls. The Kingsway Theatre at 3030 Bloor has been showing films since 1939, when a child's ticket cost ten cents. Every September the street closes for the Taste of The Kingsway, which the BIA has run since 1998 and which draws crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

The Old Mill is the neighbourhood's oldest story. Governor Simcoe commissioned a sawmill on the Humber's west bank in 1793. A later grist mill burned in 1881, and its stone ruin stood there for a hundred and twenty years. A tea room opened beside it in 1914, grew into a dining institution, and became a boutique inn in 2001. If you want to understand why people are sentimental about this neighbourhood, walk down there on a Sunday.

For green space you have Home Smith Park, Kings Mill Park, Étienne Brûlé Park, James Gardens, and about ten kilometres of Humber River trail. Two eighteen-hole golf clubs sit at the edges: Lambton Golf and Country Club across the river, and Islington Golf Club at Dundas.