Stanley Park Monument and memories

More than 50 memorials dot Vancouver's Stanley park. But once you leave the park, will you remember even one?

By Stephen Osbourne 

When you enter the leafy precincts of Stanley park, at the edge of downtown Vancouver, the first thing likely to escape your attention is the bronze statue of Lord Stanley flinging his arms into the air on the grassy knoll just inside the park entrance. The second thing you are likely to forget, only metres away, is the statue of Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest. Cross over the lawn, and you come upon the elaborate but somewhat faded memorial to Queen Victoria ("Victoria the Good,", reads the plaque. "Erected by the school children of Vancouver"). In a moment, it too, will have vanished from your memory.

Monument which are intended to make us remember tend to make us forget-nowhere more so than in Stanley park, where dozens of them sit tucked away and lost among 400 hectares of forest and pathway, lawns and beaches, playground and tennis courts and lawn bowling pitches, where they persist in the landscape as in a dream.

Lord Stanley was governor General of Canada in 1889, when he dedicated the park in his own name to "people of all colours, creeds and customs for all the time".

The remains of the original "Hollow Tree" still sit in Stanley park as a mmemorial to the 800 year old, 17 metre wide red cedar.

In the beginning

A year after Vancouver became a municipality in 1886, the first city council petitioned the federal government to lease 400 hectares of land to the city to be used as a park. Originally a forest of old growth trees that was home to Musqueam and Squamish First Nations, it was then a marine base for the Royal Navy. The British government handed over the largely logged forest land, and on September 27, 1888, Stanley park was officially opened.

Since then, the park has undergone immense changes in 1937, construction began on the Lions Gate Bridge, which linked the park to North and West Vancouver a year later. And though it took more than 60 years to build, the 8.85 kilometre long paved seawall that skirts the park was finally completed in 1980.

Stanley park is now the third largest city owned park in North America ( behind Chapultepec Park in Mexico Cit and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Fransisco ). and hosts more than eight million visitors each year.