Urban quandary

Beautiful, but urban?

Blissfully laid back, with its beaches and bridges and absurdly bucolic geographical setting, Vancouver is one town that seems to be oddly insecure about its urbanity.  

We were in town visiting family for a week, and just driving around, as one tends to do in this non-pedestrian or public transit-friendly city, we must have passed by at least 20 different local businesses named “urban” .  

There was Urban sushi. Urban Fare. And Urban Weddings. Urban tails is a pet groomer. Urban Presentations is a home staging company. You can go to Urban Spoon for brunch and Urban Thai bistro for dinner. There’s even an Urban Ashram, which is surely a contradiction in terms if ever I’ve heard one.  

What’s really ironic about Vancouver’s little urban(e) obsession, is that in the hippest part of town right now, Gastown, which is unquestionably Vancouver’s most “urban” quarter (with all of the positives and negatives that term describes), the hippest of the new hip stores cropping up like weeds through the cement is like a breath of fresh country air.  

City bumpkins Walter and Jean-Pierre in the window of Vancouver's Old Faithful

With its studied, and exquisitely displayed collection of ruggedly purist, handmade Maine blankets, twig birdhouses, raffia-tied pine soaps and vintage school notebooks, Old Faithful –and its thickly bearded owner Walter Manning (along with his styling canine companion, a champagne-coloured French bulldog named Jean-Pierre) –epitomise the  Williamsburg meets Lynchburg, Urban Woodsman vibe that unites urban hipsters in every emerging city centre across the globe right now.  

Which, as a style movement, is nostalgically, yearningly, even poetically anti-Urban. But most decidely urbane.