The Annex Guide

The Annex is Toronto at the scale of an ordinary street. It lies north of Bloor Street between roughly Avenue Road and Bathurst Street, beside the University of Toronto, and it gets its name from the fact that the city annexed it in the 1880s. What you see is a district of tall red-brick houses with turrets and deep porches, shaded by large trees, with students, professors and writers still making up much of the population. It is not a sightseeing district in the headline sense, which is the reason to come. The pleasure is in looking sideways: a porch lined with plants, a bookshop window, a student café with a queue of laptops, a laneway garage turned into a studio.

The Annex also has a story that matters to Toronto. In the 1960s the writer Jane Jacobs lived here and helped lead the fight against the Spadina Expressway, a highway that would have cut through the neighbourhood. The expressway was stopped in the early 1970s, and the area's mixed streets and low-rise scale survive partly because of that argument.

A walking route of about two hours:

1. The ROM. Begin at the Royal Ontario Museum on Bloor Street, where the crystal extension meets the older brick wings. Look at the building before you go in.
2. Bloor Street west. Walk past the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Bata Shoe Museum, which make this stretch a culture corridor.
3. St George Street. Turn north to see the main University of Toronto campus, with its Victorian stone buildings at University College.
4. Huron and Madison. The best houses are on the side streets, among them Madison Avenue and Albany Avenue. Look up at the carved gables and stained glass.
5. Bloor and Spadina. Browse the bookshops and record shops that give the avenue its character.
6. Koreatown. West of Christie Street, Bloor fills with Korean restaurants and cafés, a strong place to eat.
7. Bathurst and Bloor. The former Honest Ed's discount store stood here until it closed in 2016; the site has been redeveloped, and a small lane of heritage houses remains nearby on Markham Street.
8. Back along Dupont or Davenport. If you still have energy, climb north towards Casa Loma and the castle, which is a steep but short walk from the district.

When to come

The Annex works nearly all year. In autumn the tree canopy turns the side streets gold and red, and in winter the brick houses look sharper against bare branches. Weekday daytimes feel like student life; evenings bring crowds to the restaurants on Bloor. A weekday morning with a museum is a sensible plan, then lunch on Bloor. The district is close to Yorkville, which is a more polished neighbour a few minutes east, and to Kensington Market, a livelier one to the south.

What to skip and who it suits

Do not treat the Annex as a checklist stop; thirty minutes between meetings will not show you anything. Bloor Street itself can feel plain after the polish of Yorkville, and some stretches are simply a row of ordinary shops, so spend your time on the side streets and the campus edge. The district also feels very different in term time, when the sidewalks fill with students, from the summer months, when it turns quiet and leafy. It suits architecture lovers, readers, repeat visitors and travellers who like to see where a city actually lives. It is less useful for first-timers with only a day or two, who should put the downtown sights first. The subway makes it simple: Spadina, St George and Bathurst stations on Line 2 all serve different corners of the district. See the getting around guide for how the TTC works. If you only want the houses, you can do a loop from St George station in under an hour, then rejoin Bloor for lunch.