dbd33

But there is, in fact, a Little Britain. It's called Oakville.

britishvixen21

I have to agree that Oakville has a lot of Brits, as its a nice little town within commuter distance of Toronto, I lived in Oakville for a short time and found that there are also a lot of Portuguese there also.

babyblue

I think what we are trying to say is there is no set community !

We are all intergrated but there is no one particular area for us to go and be able to feel as if we were walking in a britsh town.
Wouldn't it be nice though?
I mean to have a really good area with fish'n'chips,good old english pub,irish bars,M & S, Woolworths, newsagents(chocolate). Just to have a little taste once in a while. Would propably help with the homesickness too!
We all like to try different theme nights. Why not go to British town instead of China town. (I am not insulting anyone as i enjoy all cultural food etc).

Why can't we have a two week festival?.
All i know of is The British Isles show once a year.
that is a cool day!
We celebrate all other cultures why not the Good old British?

babyblue

NO SUGGESTIONS?

dbd33

We have no Woolworths or M&S but I can walk to several fish and chips shops, the Feathers, the Lion, O'Farrell's, O'Shea's and the Nutty Chocolatier. It's only be more English if there was a kebab shop.

britishvixen21

Theres an awesome store in Mississauga that sell just about everything for the homesick brit.

www.abitofhome.ca

as for having a british week, id love that we should all band together and have a british expats week! Maybe the week of St Georges Day

daft batty

we willbe in oakville in 2 weeks time - never realised it was full of "brits". we stay with a friend whose house overlooks a Timmies, MOH spent hours watching folk queue for over 15 mins in the drive in for coffee when they could have parked and walked in to get one quicker, or even stayed at hoe longer. But know that we knoe more about Timmies we realise its an addiction.
we might even stroll round there for a coffee and donut ( not for me though- no gluten free stuff )

macadian

A good curry shop would be good ...find one and arrange it...would be worth it just for a good curry....

Lapsed Canuck

I have to say that I agreed with dbd's take on the post which said something about Brits integrating better than Asians. I understand that the poster was also meaning there wasn't a particular area for Brits but I think there was more to it than that and there is a point to be made about the British view of integration.

I do feel that Britain does very much suffer from the narrow view that if you are not white, you are not British - hence alot of the problems over here with the divisions between communities. You have to adjust your thinking to being in Canada as it is made up of immigrants and there are people living in those 'communities' whose families have been there for several generations. This, in British terms may not make them 'British' (it should but somehow doesn't) but in Canada, they are definitely considered Canadian.

I am not saying that Canada has the 'multi-cultural' thing perfect but it is definitely much farther along than Britain which still seems to be struggling with the idea despite centuries of immigration. Part of this is that Canada is still very much creating its identity with multi-culturalism being part of that whereas Britain is working to 're-identify' itself with many people very much wanting to hold onto old ideas.

wizzard

I think it's probably because Toronto was a primarily English city to begin with. If you go back, before large scale immigration in the 70's and go back to say the 1940's or 50's Toronto was very much a white anglo saxon protestant kind of place. In fact most of Upper Canada was English and then you had all the French folks in Quebec and a reasonable smattering oof other European immigrants from Germany and Italy etc. There was no need to have a 'little England' because Toronto was pretty much populated and run by Englihs, or rather British, settlers. So when waves of immigrants from other distinct ethnic groups settled they followed the path of creating ethnic enclaves and those areas developed a character representing that community. So all the Italian immigrants decided to live up near St Clair and you got Cosa Italia or down on College and you got 'Little Italy'. All the Chinese immigrants stayed together and formed a China Town. All the Korean immigrants decided to live around Christie and form a Little Korea and the Portugese community lived around Dufferin and so on.

British and most European nations immigrants have still continued to emmigrate to Canada but it wasn't anything new and there wasn't much need to create their own community within a city as their community was evident in the older aspects of the city, in the architecture or place names or city founders etc etc. The reason you get a lot of English people in places like Rosedale and Forest Hill and Oakville is because they all have very exclusive areas for very rich people and a lot of the older families in Toronto have British roots and even the immigrants moving over from the UK are moving over with say half a million dollrs or more of cash from property sales that allow them to live in exclusive areas like Old Oakville where as a lot of folks moving over from say India or China have very little to bring with them, especially as they don't have that currency advantage, and also when you throw in the language and culutural differences it's not suprising they all want to stay in the same area and help each other out.

I'd imagine if you were moving to a country where there was no English history really or culture like Germany or France or Spain then you;d soon find the "British" area of the city, but even still British people have been moving to Europer for some many centuries that it's still not new. If you go ot Manchester I used to live in Rusholme which was very much an Indian and Middle Eastern area of the city and you could go to China Town etc. but I couldn't have found the "American" part of Manchester or the "French sector".

dbd33

Thank you! It's funny to be accused of being PC, the accuser and I should take a drive together through the north-east suburbs.

Anyway, I used to think my children, who grew up here, were being PC in never mentioning the ethnicity of their friends. Looking for the "tall girl" in the crowd at the station would, for example, have been much simpler if she was "the tall black girl". The fact is, though, that they don't recognize physical features as being identifying characteristics. They tend to forget the language they used in minor conversations and they don't remember for an instant the race of the person with whom they had those conversations. The British people I know don't look at things this way, the race of a person is always something to note, though noticing it doesn't necessarily imply criticism.

I suggest that my children and their contemporaries are not "integrated" as there's no majority here, no one to integrate with; half the population of Toronto was born outside Canada, many of the remainder are children of immigrants. The lack of a standard, the absence of anyone specifically Canadian means that no one is really foreign and no one more local than anyone else. The city is like one of those oil camps in the middle east where no one actually belongs but everyone is vaguely equal.

That said, it's more British rahn 'ere than anywhere but Oakville, innit.

dbd33

I think there's something in the clustering of poor immigrants historically but the above looks weak to me. Asian immigrants now don't move to Spadina and Dundas but to Markham, an area with one of the highest per capita incomes in Canada. (May I say they are more than welcome to Markham; its ugly plazas and interminable roadworks).

Tidge

Just to make it really authentic, invite along a bunch of podgy, half-dressed 16-year-old girls to get drunk and throw up in the street (followed by the obligitary midnight fight!)

Gawd bless England!

Lapsed Canuck

Yes, I was going to say - are you sure you want to import 'Little Britain'.... ?
(thought I might not get away with it though so glad you brought it up first!)

Butch Cassidy

Just to be a total arsehole (and I'm good at that).

The angles and the saxons were GERMANIC!!!! Protestantism was devoloped in GERMANY!!!!! Therefore white anglo-saxon protestant is a description of the Germans Just as much as the ENGLISH.

The BRITISH includes the celts and the picts and the Vikings and the Normans et al.

Rusholme is NOT Indian it is PREDOMINATELY Pakistani and Bangladeshi (with a large middle eastern influence).

Butch