Where to Stay in Burnaby, British Columbia

What is Burnaby known for?

Burnaby keeps a long list of named residences, Baldwin House, Shaw House, Elworth, Love House, and The Gables among them, and the Burnaby Village Museum gathers the older fabric into one site. Two more institutions carry weight: the Burnaby Art Gallery and the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. Sport has a hall of its own at the Bill Copeland Sports Centre.

Vancouver sits next door.

What are the main landmarks in Burnaby?

The list runs to houses. Altnadene, Deerholme, Elworth, Aintree, and The Gables carry names rather than numbers, and the Edgar Residence, the Anderson Residence, and the Walker Residence sit in the same registry. Baldwin House and Shaw House join them, with Love House, Wintemute House, Shearer House, and Floden House filling out the record.

Three public buildings break the pattern. The Burnaby Village Museum, the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre are the places to spend an afternoon, and the Bill Copeland Sports Centre handles everything else.

What is the history of Burnaby?

Incorporation came in 1892. For the first three or four decades the place grew according to what lay on either side of it, the expanding centres of Vancouver and New Westminster pulling at both ends of the Burrard Peninsula. Farms came first.

Burnaby served as rural agricultural country supplying the markets nearby, and only later did the role of through-traffic take over from it. The corridor mattered more than the fields in the end, linking Vancouver with the Fraser Valley and the Interior of the Province across ground that had been farmland. City status arrived in 1992.

A century separated the two dates, and what filled it was the shift from supplying nearby markets to carrying the traffic of the Lower Mainland. The Burnaby Village Museum holds that story. Heritage houses carry the rest, Altnadene, Deerholme, Elworth, and the Anderson Residence among them.

The Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre records a separate thread, the Japanese Canadian presence in British Columbia, and it does so from a city that has always sat between larger neighbours. Port Moody and Coquitlam sit at the far end of that corridor. Vancouver still defines the frame.

Where is Burnaby?

The Burrard Peninsula holds it. Burnaby occupies the centre of that peninsula, with the City of Vancouver to the west and Port Moody and Coquitlam to the east. Water sets the other limits.

The District of North Vancouver lies across the confluence of the Burrard Inlet with Indian Arm to the north, New Westminster and Surrey lie across the Fraser River to the southeast, and Richmond sits on Lulu Island to the southwest. Lower Mainland is the regional name.

What is the climate of Burnaby?

Water is close on most sides. Burnaby sits in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere on a peninsula between the Burrard Inlet and the Fraser River, which keeps the swing between seasons narrower than it would be inland. The Lower Mainland shares that pattern.

Neither extreme lasts long here, and an indoor day at the Burnaby Art Gallery or the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre covers the weather that does arrive. Layers cover it.

How do you get to Burnaby?

Burnaby was built as a corridor. The route between Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, and the Interior of the Province has run across this ground since the early decades after incorporation, and arrivals still come the same way. The City of Vancouver adjoins to the west.

New Westminster lies the other way, Port Moody and Coquitlam to the east, and Surrey and Richmond across the water, so approaches come from every side of the Burrard Peninsula. None of those approaches is long.