The company delivering gas to homes and businesses in London, Ontario, is Enbridge. A Canadian company, as far as I know, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. The biggest name in natural gas heating and electric cooling equipment in London is Reliance Home Comfort. Many of its customers believe that it too is a Canadian operation. It was but it isn't today.
Originally, Reliance was owned by Union Gas. Today Union Gas is no more having been taken over by Enbridge. And Reliance, its connection to Union Gas severed years ago, is now controlled by the family of Hong Kong-based Chinese-Canadian businessman Victor Li.
Have these changes been good for London? Have they been good for Ontario? On the surface, it would seem a larger share of the money generated by this residential and commercial gas business may have once circulated throughout the city and province, for the most part. Now, with the Hong Kong and Bermuda connections, a lot of the profits may be leaving the country.
I am not a financial wizard. I cannot say if the present set-up is better or worse for Londoners, for Canadians. But one thing seems certain, it is better for the governments of Hong Kong and Bermuda.
When I was a boy in the early '50s, one would not have encountered a lawn statue like this one displayed with the Canadian flag. For one thing, the maple leaf flag was not the Canadian flag until 1965.
Are these Canadian Geese out for a morning stroll in order to meet the 10,000 footsteps-a-day goal? If they are, I am sure the folk in this neigbourhood are hoping the geese take all their steps in a straight line. Geese are not welcome in residential neighbourhoods. Nothing messes up an area's sidewalks and lawns like a flock of geese. Yuck!
Are these lilies special? They certainly are beautiful. These lilies also came from the lily fields now plowed under with the retirement of the couple who ran the lily operation. If you'd like to know more here is a link to an earlier post: A colourful, beautiful memory.
Many urban critics love to point out how the car has shaped and modified the suburban home. Home after home has yielded half or more of the front lawn to the car. A paved driveway replaces grass for a big chunk of many a suburban front yard. And then there are the garages. Many of these jut out a metre or more in front of each home on the suburban street. There is even a name for this style of home building: the garage forward look.
What these critics ignore is that the car has also reshaped our older, heritage neighbourhoods. And just like in the suburbs, a paved spot for the family car or cars claims a big part of the front yard. In fact, the narrow lots in older neighbourhoods demands that occasionally the entire front yard must be given over to the car.
Many have called the telephone an indispensable tool. But telephones today come in many guises and the two we use in our home are both slowly losing the telephone popularity contest to more modern designs.
This GE-made landline telephone has been constantly in use in our home for decades. The only problem encountered is with the coiled cord attaching the telephone to its receiver. The cord eventually gets tangled and fails
.
As of a few days ago, we are down to one telephone. The cord on one telephone has failed. Worse, we are finding replacing the coiled cord today is quite difficult. With fewer and fewer people using landlines, the demand for replacement coiled cords is drying up.
The telephone as a tool is needed more today than ever. But the original landline models may almost disappear at some point in the near future. Telephone technology has moved on and the telephone tool of yesterday may be the door stop of tomorrow.
One often reads criticisms of the homes in new developments. A big one is that homes can look alike. So? I can point to quite a number of neighbourhoods through out London where sometimes six or more homes have been built all the same: cookie cutter homes.
Yesterday I featured two homes that were quite similar. Today I am posting two twin homes in the same neighbourhood. There are lots of things to criticize when it comes to new homes, and I have to admit that in recent years popping up similar homes side by side and row after row takes the building of similar homes to an arguably ridiculous extreme, but the idea of building identical twin homes is not new. And sometimes, as in the past, it worked.
These two homes sit side by side in North London. They look quite similar at first glance. It makes one wonder if the homes shared the same builder. The home on the left is a heritage home with plaque beside the front door. It declares that the home dates from 1911 and that its first owner was Alfred Ironside who farmed some acreage outside London and then moved into the city to work as a cattle dealer.
There is a fabulous, architecturally designed neighbourhood in Detroit known as the Historic Boston-Edison Neighbourhood. This handsome home in North London has always reminded me of some of the homes found in that iconic Detroit development. It also brings to mind the Chicago home in Home Alone but on a slightly less grand scale. Do you agree?
This clay brick home in North London features the area's much loved yellow brick which was made
from the rich, limestone-saturated but iron-deficient clay found throughout Perth and
Middlesex Counties. It was manufactured locally and used in most building
construction in the late 19th and early 20th century. Reportedly, London has the highest concentration of yellow brick homes of any place in the province.
Note the interesting pattern in the brick below the eavestrough. And notice all the upgrades that this home has enjoyed over the years. Lighting, shutters, front door, stone porch and steps plus a carefully done rear addition. The homes in North London are aging very gracefully.
When I was a boy the immediate neighbourhood where I lived had almost no homes with an attached garage. Even carports were rare. We did have alleys and some homes had a garage accessed from the alley behind the home.
This home in North London must have been a rare beauty when it was new. It had an attached garage, set back a little and not built in the later garage-forward style. The front door was impressive in a quiet way with its cut ston and thick wood trim. I would not be surprised if the wood door with large, black hinges is either the original or a replacement door with the look of the original.
This is a home that has lost none of its eloquent demeanour over the passing decades. Nor has its neighbourhood, for that matter.
At one time, North London was THE neighbourhood. It held onto its number one position in the neighbourhood pecking order for decades. It still rates quite high in the neighbourhood sweepstakes even today. Many of the homes are beautiful. Oh, some are small and others are quite large but almost all have personality to spare.
At one time both millionaires and people of much lesser means lived in the same neighbourhood. Clearly, this was never a millionaire's home. But in the coming days I will post some much pictures of much larger, grander homes. Today, homes are grouped together by value. Not so in the distant past.
The man and his wife used to sell lilies. Lovely lilies. They had a small farm but they didn't raise one of the usual cash crops. They grew lilies.
The farm was very popular and folks came from hundreds of miles to visit their acres of lily beds and place orders for their favourite blooms, many of which were unique or at least rare.
But time marches on and a few years ago the couple got too old to continue and they retired. The lily beds were emptied of flowers and today the land is devoid of lilies. And yet, the memories linger and come to life in the thousands and thousands of beautiful blooms in flower beds across the province.
