York
Vaughan
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.
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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.
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Markham
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.
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Richmond Hill
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.
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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.
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Aurora
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.
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King Township
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.
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Stouffville
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.
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East Gwillimbury
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.
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Georgina
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.
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