Area Guides
All 29 of them. What each place is actually like rather than what it sells as, how the locals say the name, what is worth the drive, and the one drawback nobody mentions on a listing.
City of Toronto5
Toronto
Everything, all at once, within about four square kilometres. If you have just landed and do not yet know which part of this region is yours, spend your first year here: it is the only place in the GTA you can live properly without a car, and every other community on this site is a train ride from it.
Toronto
The east end of the city, and the best place to eat in it. A huge share of everybody who arrives in this country lands in Scarborough first, which is why its strip malls are the ones people drive across the whole region for.
Toronto
A downtown of its own stacked along Yonge Street, wrapped in post-war bungalows and ravines. It has the best Persian and Korean food on the continent, a subway line down the middle, and a civic square that programmes something free most of the summer.
Toronto
The west end: lakefront towers along the bottom, wide lots and old trees through the middle, the airport and the racetrack at the top. It is where a lot of people end up when they want a Toronto postcode and a driveway.
Toronto
The smallest, friendliest piece of the city and the last borough in Canada until 1998. Brick semis, deep back gardens, ravines on two sides, and Greektown running along the bottom of it.
Peel Region3
Peel
Canada's seventh-largest city, and nobody's second choice any more. A real downtown at Square One, a lakeshore strung with harbour villages, and one of the most linguistically diverse populations on earth.
Peel
Young, fast and unapologetically itself. Brampton has one of the youngest median ages of any big city in Canada, an OHL team it got back, and Punjabi, Caribbean and Nigerian food that the rest of the GTA drives out here for.
Peel
The GTA's back garden. Rolling hills, gravel roads, the Bruce Trail, and villages (Bolton, Caledon East, Inglewood, Alton) that carry on as though they are not half an hour from a six-lane highway.
York Region9
York
New, big and thoroughly Italian. Vaughan built itself in a generation (Woodbridge, Maple, Thornhill, Kleinburg, Concord) and then got a subway extension, a downtown from scratch and the country's biggest theme park.
York
A preserved nineteenth-century main street on one side and one of the best Chinese and South Asian food scenes on the continent on the other. Markham also holds a lot of the country's tech, which is why so many people here commute out of Toronto rather than into it.
York
Yonge Street's most crowded stretch, a very good pond, and Canada's largest optical telescope. Richmond Hill is dense along its spine and leafy either side of it, with big Iranian and Chinese communities and the food that comes with them.
York
One of the best main streets in the region with a lake at the end of it. Quaker-founded, Victorian brick, and busier on a Saturday morning than towns three times the size.
York
Newmarket's older, quieter neighbour. A Victorian downtown at Yonge and Wellington, a great deal of protected forest, and one of the best-run junior hockey clubs in the province.
York
Horse country. King City, Nobleton and Schomberg sit inside the Oak Ridges Moraine, surrounded by some of the most tightly protected green space in southern Ontario, and twenty minutes from a subway station.
York
A main street with a clock tower, a lake that turned from cottages into houses, and enough farmland still left that you can buy corn from a table with an honesty box on it.
York
The northern edge of the region and, for years running, one of the fastest-growing towns in Canada by percentage. Holland Landing, Sharon, Queensville and Mount Albert: four villages, a remarkable historic temple, and a great deal of new brick going up between them.
York
Lake Simcoe, and everything that comes with it: ice huts in February, beaches in July, and three towns (Keswick, Sutton and Jackson's Point) that were cottage country long before they were commuter country.
Durham Region8
Durham
Where Durham begins and the Rouge ends. A bay full of sailing boats, a nuclear station everybody is entirely relaxed about, a casino, and the first exit east where the house prices stop looking like Toronto's.
Durham
Named after a warship and laid out around the munitions plant that built it, which is why so many streets carry the names of HMS Ajax's crew. Now one of the most diverse towns in Canada, with three unbroken kilometres of lakefront park along the bottom of it.
Durham
The best-balanced town in Durham. A real downtown, a working harbour, a village at the top called Brooklin that still runs its own spring fair, and an arena complex big enough to hold most of a minor hockey association at once.
Durham
The city General Motors built, and it did not stop when the line slowed down. Oshawa has a university, a downtown full of live music, two professional teams in the same arena, and the cheapest waterfront in the GTA.
Durham
Four towns and a racetrack. Bowmanville, Courtice, Newcastle and Orono spread east from Oshawa into orchard country, with a Victorian main street at the middle of it and the GO train finally reaching in.
Durham
The Trail Capital of Canada (the federal designation is real) with over 220 kilometres of trail through the Oak Ridges Moraine, a Victorian main street, and a mausoleum on a hill that people call Ontario's Taj Mahal.
Durham
A Victorian main street that runs straight down into a lake. Port Perry is the prettiest thing in Durham, and Scugog is the farmland, the island and the water around it.
Durham
The quietest corner of the GTA and the only piece of it on Lake Simcoe's eastern shore. Beaverton, Cannington and Sunderland: three villages, a harbour, and the official federal designation of Smallmouth Bass Capital of Canada.
Halton Region4
Halton
A harbour town that has been wealthy for two hundred years and looks it. Low brick, old trees, two lakefront villages, and a main street that still mostly closes at six.
Halton
Technically Halton, spiritually its own thing. Burlington sits between the lake and the escarpment, with the country's largest botanical garden on one side and its largest ribfest on the other, and it turns up near the top of the best-place-to-live lists most years.
Halton
The fastest-growing town in Canada for much of the last twenty years, sitting directly under the Niagara Escarpment. Half of Milton is brand new; the other half is a limestone main street, a ski hill and a velodrome.
Halton
Georgetown and Acton, joined by a township and separated by fifteen minutes of farmland. Escarpment, Bruce Trail, two proper main streets, and a leather-tanning history that Acton has turned into a festival.
