Whitby Harbour & the Waterfront Trail
A working marina with a paved trail running east and west from it, and a lighthouse at the end. Flat, easy, and busy at dawn.
Whitby
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.
Stock photograph. Not Whitby.
Downtown, harbour and farmland
Feels like
45 min by GO
To Union Station
A town centre and a lakefront, same price
Go for
How to say it
Whitby, and then say which bit: downtown Whitby, Brooklin at the top, or the harbour. Brooklin thinks of itself as a village rather than a suburb and will tell you so.
Heads up
Brooklin and downtown Whitby are ten minutes and two entirely different towns apart. Drive both, in winter: Brooklin catches the snow that the lakeshore does not.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
Junior lacrosse
Whitby Warriors
One of the most decorated junior lacrosse clubs in the country. Box lacrosse in a hot arena in July is about as Canadian as an evening gets.
Everything else
Iroquois Park Sports Centre
Eight ice pads under one roof, plus pools and courts. If you have a child in hockey, ringette or figure skating, you will spend a meaningful part of your life in this building.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Whitby.
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.
Brock Street, downtown
Four blocks of Victorian shopfronts, independent coffee, a couple of good bakeries and a genuinely busy Saturday.
Whitby Courthouse Theatre
Community theatre in an 1853 courthouse, running since 1946. Cheap tickets, and the building alone is worth the visit.
Heydenshore Park
A pavilion, a beach and a park on the lake at the bottom of town. The default summer picnic, and the concert venue when the town programmes one.
Station Gallery
A public art gallery in a restored 1903 railway station, free to walk into, with a shop and studio classes attached.
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”.
June
Brooklin Spring Fair
Running since 1911: livestock, a midway, a demolition derby, and a village that quadruples in size for four days.
Summer
Whitby Ribfest
A long weekend of smoke and live bands, free to get into, at the town's main park.
November
Santa Claus Parade
Down Brock Street with the whole of downtown out on the pavement. Whitby takes this one very seriously.
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.