Stratford

Settlement here began in 1832, when Thomas Mercer Jones, an agent of the Canada Company, named the village Stratford after Shakespeare's birthplace and renamed the stretch of river through it the Avon; an inn on the site took the name Shakespeare Hotel. Settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany cleared the surrounding forest, and the town became the seat of Perth County in the 1850s. It was incorporated as a town in 1859 and as a city in 1886.

Railways made it. The Grand Trunk line arrived in 1856, and in 1871 the company opened a major railway repair yard here; the locomotive shops became the town's main employer, at one time employing 40 per cent of the population. Furniture-making was the other great industry: by the 1920s nearly one-sixth of the furniture made in Canada was shipped from Stratford, and in 1933 a general strike led by furniture workers brought in the army, the last time troops were used against a strike in Canada. The courthouse of 1887 and the city hall of 1900 date from this prosperous era.

The railway shops closed in 1964, and all major manufacturing had ceased by 2006. The answer came from a local journalist, Tom Patterson, who proposed a Shakespeare festival and in 1952 enlisted the British director Tyrone Guthrie; the first season opened in July 1953. The first season, with Alec Guinness in Richard III, played in a canvas tent on the river bank; the permanent Festival Theatre replaced the tent in 1957. The festival grew into a major repertory company and turned a fading industrial town into one of Canada's best-known cultural destinations, a transformation that remains its defining story.

The Stratford Festival is the centre of everything. Each season runs for more than half the year across the Festival, Avon, Tom Patterson and Studio theatres, mixing Shakespeare and other classics with musicals and new Canadian work, and the company has been a training ground for generations of Canadian actors. Since the 1950s many have lived in the town year-round, and the presence of hundreds of actors, musicians, designers and craftspeople gives a small Ontario city an unusually artistic character, visible in its galleries, its bookshops and the summer music festival held in venues around downtown.

The swans are the other symbol. Mute swans have lived on the Avon for generations, twenty-four are released onto the river each year, and their return each April is marked by the Swan Weekend. The riverside paths and the Shakespearean Gardens, modelled on traditional English gardens, complete a riverside that echoes the English original.

The town has a second, very different claim to fame as the home of Justin Bieber, who busked in front of the Avon Theatre as a boy, and his fans still follow a tourism map of sites from his early life. Behind the festival front, Stratford is a county town for a farming district, with hockey rinks, a rugby club called the Black Swans, Legion halls and a strong sense of its railway past. Manners are small-town Ontario: friendly, unhurried and reserved, with a quiet pride in a place that could easily have faded.

About 33,000 people live in Stratford, with the population growing slowly, by under 6 per cent between 2016 and 2021. The festival is the largest employer in the arts and underpins the hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants, but manufacturing still matters: auto parts and other plants on the industrial edges of town, and a data centre, alongside the farms and agricultural businesses of Perth County, one of Ontario's dairy and hog-farming districts. The University of Waterloo runs a campus here for interaction design, and a cooking school adds to the food trade.

People live in the Victorian streets around the river and the theatres, in the former railway workers' districts to the north and east, and in newer subdivisions on the edges. Housing costs are a concern, as across Ontario, and the seasonal nature of festival work means that many restaurant and hotel jobs disappear in winter.

The year has two speeds. From spring to autumn the town fills with visitors on performance days, the restaurants are full before curtain time and the river parks are busy; in winter the streets are quiet, the theatres are mostly dark, and the town turns inward to hockey, the arena and the cold. Through both halves the rhythm is that of a small city where most errands are done on foot or in a short drive, and where the swans on the river and the clock on the city hall mark the days.

Stratford eats better than most towns its size because the festival audience expects it to. For decades theatre-goers have come for dinner as much as for the play, and the result is a downtown of bistros, bakeries, chocolatiers and restaurants whose cooks were often trained at the local chefs' school. Menus lean on Perth County: pork and bacon from the surrounding farms, beef, lamb, cheese and the vegetables grown on the rich farmland around the town.

The Bacon & Ale Trail, a self-guided tasting route, sends visitors from business to business with vouchers for small servings of bacon or beer, and bakeries and sweet shops are part of the downtown mix. Butter tarts, the Ontario pastry of sugar, butter and egg in a flaky shell, are sold in most bakeries, and poutine and the Nanaimo bar are as common as anywhere in Canada.

Ontario's craft breweries supply the pubs, and wines from the Niagara Peninsula and Prince Edward County fill the lists. Pre-theatre dining is an institution with its own timing, and the cafés near the river do a steady trade in coffee and ice cream for people walking the banks between performances. Local sausages, cheese and baking from Perth County are sold in the town's food shops.