2018 Award of Merit – Heritage Education, Awareness and Scholarship

The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life

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Awarded to:

Michael McClelland, ERA Architects
Tatum Taylor, ERA Architects

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Client:

Coach House Books

The Ward Uncovered is a second anthology (following 2015’s award-winning The Ward) that explores the stories of St John’s Ward, an area of Toronto that was home to waves of immigrants between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Despite the neighbourhood’s liveliness, the City considered it a slum, and bulldozed the area in the late 1950s to make way for a new civic square. In early 2015, a team of archaeologists began digging up a parking lot next to Toronto City Hall and uncovered an extraordinarily rich buried history. The Ward Uncovered brings to life this neighbourhood that was long ago erased from the face of contemporary Toronto and aims to continue to acknowledge this area’s marginalized history and dialogue about how Toronto addresses diversity, urban evolution, and heritage recognition. Produced over the course of nearly three years, the book was published in June 2018 by Coach House Books.