Guelph
— — a limestone town the river runs through.
Not only on a wall.
“A small limestone city on the Speed River, with the twin towers of the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate on the hill above downtown. Guelph was laid out in 1827 by the Scottish novelist John Galt on a fan-shaped plan radiating from the river — one of the few designed-from-scratch towns of its era in Upper Canada. The grey local limestone gives the old core its weight; the university to the south gives it its weekday crowd. Late autumn in Royal City is dolomite grey, oxblood brick, and slow brown water.
Guelph, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Guelph is a city of about 144,000 residents in southwestern Ontario, roughly 100 kilometres west of Toronto and 30 kilometres east of Kitchener-Waterloo. It sits where the Speed River meets the Eramosa, at an elevation of about 334 metres on the Galt-Paris moraine. The city was founded on St. George's Day, 23 April 1827, by the Scottish novelist John Galt on behalf of the Canada Company, and was laid out on a fan-shaped plan radiating from the river — an unusual design for Upper Canada. The University of Guelph, established in 1964 on the older grounds of the Ontario Agricultural College, sits at the south edge of the city.
The old core of Guelph is built largely from a hard local dolomitic limestone quarried within the city's own moraine. The most prominent example is the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate on Catholic Hill, designed by Joseph Connolly in a French Gothic Revival style and completed in 1888; its twin towers rise to 65 metres and dominate the downtown skyline. The 1857 city hall on Carden Street, the old Wellington County Court House of 1843, and most of the warehouses along the Speed share the same grey-buff stone. Pope Benedict XVI raised the church to the rank of minor basilica in 2014.
Downtown Guelph is compact and walkable. The Saturday farmers' market at the corner of Gordon and Waterloo has been running on the same block since 1827, making it one of the oldest continuously operating markets in Canada. The Guelph Civic Museum sits in a restored 1850s loretto building on Catholic Hill, beside the basilica. The Speed River trail follows the water past the John Galt cairn at the founding site and through Royal City Park. The Hillside Festival, held each July on Guelph Lake, has drawn folk and roots audiences since 1984. Through-trains on the Toronto-London corridor stop at the 1911 Grand Trunk station downtown.