Elora Mews

Before we finish this walking tour, take a look around the Mews courtyard. This small corner of Mill Street West has its own connection to Elora's industrial past. By the late nineteenth century, the Mundell Furniture Company had become one of Elora's important manufacturers. Furniture was produced and finished at several properties around the village, including buildings along Mill Street West and on the south side of the river.

In 1898, the company opened a retail store in the buildings now known as the Elora Mews. More than a century later, people are still coming through this space to browse, meet, shop, and spend time downtown. That feels like an appropriate place to end.

Over the course of this walking tour, we've moved through nearly two hundred years of decisions about land, buildings, and public space, and seen how these choices continue to shape community life today.

We've seen a new mixed-use building add rental homes to an established downtown, followed older buildings through new uses, visited a school that became an arts centre, a factory site that became a park, and a gas station that became a public gathering space. We've watched a residential street gradually become a commercial one, and seen heritage buildings restored, a bridge returned to the river, and public spaces redesigned around the way people experience downtown on foot.

Each place carries more than one story, and each generation adds another layer. That ongoing process is part of planning. While the changes to the properties and streetscapes we’ve visited were often not historically a direct result of decisions made by land use planners, today’s decisions are guided and influenced by them. The streets and buildings around you reflect choices made decades ago alongside decisions being made today. Together, they influence where people live, how they move, where they gather, what gets preserved, and how familiar places continue to adapt.

There are shops, cafés, places for a treat, and spaces to sit throughout the streets around you. Take some time to explore, and as you do, see how many of the planning details you've noticed along the way begin to appear in the rest of downtown Elora.

Thank you for joining us in Elora for World Town Planning Day.

Our walk ends here, but you're in a good place to stay a while.