Main Street South
Two blocks of Victorian shopfronts with four or five independent cafés between them, a bookshop, and patios that spill into the road in summer.
Newmarket
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.
Stock photograph. Not Newmarket.
A proper town centre
Feels like
60 min by GO
To Union Station
A walkable high street and a garden
Go for
How to say it
Newmarket. “Main Street” always means Main Street South, the historic stretch, and “the Riverwalk” means Riverwalk Commons, the square behind it. Both are one place in practice.
Heads up
It is an hour to downtown on a good day, and the Barrie GO line thins out in the evening. If you work downtown five days a week, ride it once at 6pm before you decide.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
OJHL junior hockey
Newmarket Hurricanes
Junior A hockey with a long history in this town. Fifteen dollars, a hot dog, and the loudest room in Newmarket on a winter Friday.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Newmarket.
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.
Fairy Lake & the Tom Taylor Trail
A lake at the bottom of the main street with a paved trail running the length of the town from it. Flat, pretty, and busy at every hour.
Riverwalk Commons
The square behind Main Street: a splash pad in summer, a free skating rink in winter, and something programmed most weekends.
Newmarket Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings, and it has been running since 1884. One of Ontario's oldest, and it still takes over the whole of Riverwalk Commons.
Old Town Hall
An 1883 town hall restored into a small performance space. Music, comedy and community theatre, in a room that seats about two hundred.
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
Newmarket Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings since 1884. If you want to meet Newmarket, this is where all of it goes.
July
Canada Day at Riverwalk Commons
The whole town in one square, with fireworks over Fairy Lake. Free and walkable from the main street.
December–February
Skating at Riverwalk Commons
A free outdoor rink in the middle of town, lit until late, with skate rental beside it. The default winter evening.
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.