Kelso & Glen Eden
One conservation area with two personalities: hiking, mountain biking and a lake in summer, and a full ski and snowboard hill from December.
Milton
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.
Stock photograph. Not Milton.
A new town under a cliff
Feels like
50 min by GO, peak only
To Union Station
New builds with an escarpment behind them
Go for
How to say it
MIL-ton. “Old Milton” means the original grid around Mill Street and Main; everything else gets described by its developer's neighbourhood name, which means nothing to anyone outside town.
Heads up
The Milton GO line is peak-only and one-directional: in to Toronto in the morning, out in the evening, and very little between. Read the timetable before you plan a life around it.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
Track cycling
Mattamy National Cycling Centre
The only velodrome of its kind in Canada: a 250-metre timber track banked at 42 degrees. You can book a beginner session and ride it yourself, which almost nobody realises.
OJHL junior hockey
Milton Menace
Junior A hockey in a town that has quadrupled in size around it. Cheap seats and a short walk from the main street.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Milton.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
Rattlesnake Point
Six hundred acres of escarpment cliff with the Bruce Trail along the top, and lookouts over the whole of Halton. Rock climbing, if that is your thing.
Main Street & Mill Street
Old Milton's limestone core: independents, a bakery, a bookshop, and a Saturday that feels like a much older town than the map suggests.
Country Heritage Park
Eighty acres and thirty-odd buildings of Ontario agricultural history, and the venue for the town's biggest annual events.
Milton Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings in the town centre through the warm months, with a lot of Halton's own growers on it.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
May–October
Milton Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings downtown. Halton's growers, and the fastest way to work out who your neighbours are.
September
Steam-Era
Labour Day weekend at Country Heritage Park: one of the largest antique steam and gas engine shows in the country, and much more fun than it sounds.
December
Christmas in downtown Milton
The main street lit and closed for the evening, with a parade. Small-town, and Milton hangs onto it hard.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.