Durham
Pickering
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.
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Area Guides
Everywhere between Burlington and Bowmanville.
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.
Durham Region8
Durham
Ajax
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.
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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.
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Oshawa
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.
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Clarington
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.
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Uxbridge
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.
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Scugog & Port Perry
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.
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Brock & Beaverton
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.
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