It provides a safe haven for fishermen and sailors, as it has done since 1827, and shelter for today’s discerning homebuyer, who demands more from his home and community than mere concrete, wood, and street-lights.

This sometimes sleepy, sometimes dynamic little community, perched on the banks of the busy Fraser River, looks westward to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, now a national heritage site with a museum and gift shop, and beyond to the rugged, natural vegetation of Garry Point Park. Views over the river to the south include the mountainous Olympic Peninsula and snowcapped Mount Baker, and to the east lies the site of the old B.C. Packers’ Plant, now resurrected as residential housing and a seaside park

Single-family modern homes and cozy, character dwellings are found in the Village and its surrounding area, together known as Steveston. Although part of the City of Richmond, Steveston possesses its own unique charm. The Village of Steveston is the beating heart of this little corner of Richmond, which at times seems caught in a time warp, one foot in the new millennium, and the other in its colourful and sometimes bawdy history.

In the late nineteenth century Steveston Village, essentially an agricultural center, was transformed each fishing season into a typical west coast boomtown. Its population swelled from approximately four hundred persons to at least six thousand as a result of the annual influx of itinerant, cannery workers.

The ethnic mix of these workers, who were largely single males, included First Nations, Japanese, Finnish, Yugoslavian and other peoples, but the most numerous were the Chinese. The canneries provided rudimentary living accommodations on site, and one such two storey building, which once sat on piles driven into a riverbed, may be found next to the Britannia Heritage Shipyards. Entrepreneurs were quick to provide for the other various needs and wants of the preponderantly male population, and consequently at the turn of the twentieth century Steveston boasted thirteen canneries, five legal liquor outlets, a number of gambling and sporting houses, an opium trade, and a thriving bootlegging industry.