For more info and to register, visit www.janeswalkottawa.ca.
Jane's Walk is offering walking tours as part of the 2025 edition of Ottawa Architecture Week. This year's theme is Mapping the Market: Spatial Anchors & Planned Histories. One of Ottawa’s oldest neighborhoods, the ByWard Market has long been a site of cultural exchange, architectural layering, and collective memory. Changes to Ottawa's downtown are upon us in light of the recent pandemic, city growth, and accelerated development; and changes are being proposed for the Market as part of that evolution: What should we be doing to honour the past while imagining a future that is inclusive, sustainable, and rooted in place?
We invite everyone—from long-time residents to first-time visitors—to join in re-imagining the ByWard Market not just as a historic site, but as a living, breathing urban landscape where memory and innovation can coexist
The ByWard Market in Literature
Join us for an interactive walk through Ottawa's ByWard Market area as we explore some familiar streets and landmarks through works of fiction and poetry. There are so many books we could explore, and so many neighbourhoods across Ottawa, but for this walk we'll stay in the area around the Byward Market.
We'll be doing some readings and/or discussing the choice of setting for selected works, and musing on what the location may be telling us about the meaning of the work as well as the cultural and sociological meaning of the location and of the ByWard Market in general, in the past and in the present.
The following are books we may touch on or read from ((there may be others):
Amy Tector — The Foulest Things
Andre Alexis — The Night Piece and Childhood
Ben Ladouceur — Otter
Brenda Chapman — Cold Mourning
Christopher Levenson — Duplicities
David Blaikie — A Seaon in Lowertown
Deborah-Anne Tunney — The View from the Lane & Other Stories
Elizabeth Hay — A Student of Weather
John Barton — Designs from the Interior: Poems
Joyce Wayne — Last Night of the World
Katie Tallo — Poison Lilies
Lea Graham — Calendar Girls
Nina Berkhout — The Gallery of Lost Species
Norman Levine — I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well and Other Stories
Rob Mclennan — On Beauty: Stories and The Ottawa City Project
Susan McMaster — Until the Light Bends
Terry Fallis — Operation Angus
Note: this is not an exhaustive list of work referencing, or set in, the Byward Market. There are lots more.
About Jane's Walk:
Our walks are led by volunteers and are free to attend. Check out Tips for Participants.
We are asking participants to sign up to give us an estimate of attendance. Sign-up instructions are provided on the walk page.
When you sign up for a walk, you will receive email confirming your reservation.
Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
While you walk, we encourage you to think about and acknowledge the land where we live, work, and walk. The Ottawa-Gatineau region is the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. The Algonquin People have inhabited and cared for these lands for millennia and we express our gratitude to and respect for them.