Richmond
— — a river-mouth city the tide remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“An island city between the arms of the Fraser, where Steveston was once the busiest salmon port in the world and the Britannia Shipyards still stand at the water. More than half the residents are of Chinese ancestry, and the summer night market is the largest in North America. The flatness is the flatness of the delta, lined with dyke paths, blueberry fields, and the long view of the North Shore mountains across the river.
Richmond, 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.
Richmond occupies Lulu Island and Sea Island in the Fraser River delta, immediately south of Vancouver and west of New Westminster, and is part of Metro Vancouver in British Columbia. Its population is about 210,000, and the city covers 129 square kilometres of largely reclaimed land at near sea level, protected by 49 kilometres of dykes. Vancouver International Airport is on Sea Island. Richmond was incorporated in 1879 and built on salmon canning at Steveston, where as many as fifteen canneries operated along the south arm of the river in the 1890s.
The Fraser River reaches the Strait of Georgia through three arms, and Richmond sits in the centre of the delta the river is still building. The dyke system was first laid out in the 1880s by Chinese, Japanese, and Indigenous labourers, and now carries a continuous walking and cycling path 49 kilometres around the city. At Garry Point in Steveston, the channel runs against the open Pacific and the fishing fleet still moors at the public dock. The Britannia Shipyards, opened in 1885, is preserved as a National Historic Site of Canada.
Richmond is reached from downtown Vancouver in about twenty-five minutes on the Canada Line, which crosses the north arm of the Fraser on a 600-metre bridge and continues to YVR. Steveston Village, the former cannery town, is at the south side of Lulu Island and best walked from Garry Point Park along the boardwalk to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. The Richmond Night Market, running May through October near Bridgeport Station, draws around a million visitors over the season and is the largest outdoor night market in North America.