absolutely. dave's is the best! although i havent seen "dave" for years and years. i only see his DEI hire's running amok. Im not sure how they communicate with each other, nobody speaks ah engrish. you got like 3 japanese fobs, 2 flip fobs, and some ching chong mixed with a grumpy old white dude.

That’s weird the last 2 times I went there last summer it was all white kids lol

Dave died his kid owns the place

Dave's is great, haven't been in a few years but when I think of fish and chips I think of a place like Dave's. I'm also a big fan of Cockney Kings - same style of place. The Kensington location now has a really hot waitress too so you can go get a blood test with Lifelabs Hottie and then knock down some AYCE fish and chips with a near Cactus Club level hottie.

now i gotta try it!!! do they have mushy peas!? i havent found a place in vancouver that has mushy peas

No, but its 5min away from my place, I can attest to the hot waitress during my Uber Eat runs

This comment from 2009 hits hard. It tells it's own history.

Now, you might say, so many kids growing up in 800K+ 1 bedroom condos and sleeping on the floor in the living room. Which is the original problem the author was contrasting.

Nostalgia hit hard when I saw this picture.

Metrotown’s Playdium from the 1990s:

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...86beb79039.jpg


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Had the worst date of my life there. I was running late and my shirt wasn't 100% dry from the dryer yet, but I went anyways.

The shirt smelled soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bad!

Holy fuck... I should have just worn a dirty shirt to the mall, bought a new shirt, and thrown the dirty one in a garbage can and gone and rocked the date! Oh well, I was like 19-20, live and learn... haha!

Still remember try to swipe like 10X games after it locks out if u try within 3 mins.

I remember taking a latina gal to Silver City and then Playdium back when I was 18, we stayed until closing. She invited me back to her apartment in Surrey after so we took the train there at like 12AM, I already thought it was kinda weird she had her own apartment at our age, but apparently it was her "friend's".

A good long night of shagging, I woke in the morning and trained home back to Burnaby. By afternoon my piss was BURNING -- 18-year-old me had no idea what was going on, little did I know I was about to have my first interaction with the ol' clappidy clap. It turns out the girl was escorting :lol

Ahh, Playdium memories.

wait what? you played DDR and got the clap ?!

You better believe it, and pretty sure we were playing Marvel Vs Capcom :lol

thats what happens when you try and fuck morrigan from marvel vs capcom

Love that reference :lol

https://richmondarchives.ca/2019/02/...fore-richmond/

TIL: Lulu Island, the main island that makes up Richmond used to be separated into two islands by a channel.

You can see the remnants of that channel in this photo - it's the tract of farmland that runs from from Annacis Island up towards Mitchell Island

https://richmondarchives.ca/wp-conte...ond.jpg?w=1168

Also interesting is that Richmond used to be regularly flooded into the 60s and even into the 70s would sometimes flood as the development of the dyke took a long time: https://richmondarchives.ca/2025/08/...storic-floods/

Sea Island also looks very different in shape today compared to the original survey and you can see how the street grid was created:

https://richmondarchives.ca/wp-conte.../02/rcf-17.jpg

Continuing my dive into the rabbit hole of Richmond...

Mitchell Island today is actually a combination of 3 separate islands: Mitchell, Twigg, and Eburne. Twigg and Eburne are still recognised via street names on Mitchell. This is from 1935 and you can see the original Fraser Street bridge right down the middle but even in 1929, the City of Vancouver had designated Knight street as a major arterial so the future replacement was always going to be a Knight street bridge (TIL: the deck of the Knight bridge is heated!).

https://richmondarchives.ca/wp-conte...hmond-dtl1.jpg

very very cool. i wish i could have seen richmond before all the ching chongs took it over. It sounds like a pastoral paradise full of angry ass white people

That explains why there's not a lot of snow accumulation on Knight Street bridge

My rabbit hole continues and expands onto other nerdy land things....

There's a thing called Gunter's Chain which is 66 ft long and 10 of these chains make a furlong (660ft) and 8 furlongs make a mile which leads to...

Most of the GVRD's roads and lots are based on this measurement so the distance between No 1 Road and No 2 Road is, you guessed it, 1 mile and the distance between 64th Ave and 72nd Ave in Surrey is, you guessed it, 1 mile and each avenue in Surrey represents a furlong. (Aside: A 66ft wide furlong is an acre so a 1 mile by 1 mile plot of land is 80 acres)

The entire grid starts from Coast Meridian which is the spot where the 49th parallel hits water - if you look on a map Coast Merdian road (and 168th St) points right at this point and then North Road is 6 miles from Coast Meridian and Boundary is 6 miles from North Road and it looks like Arbutus (which was a major corridor back in the day) is 6 miles from Boundary. No 2 road and No 8 road (6 miles apart) line up with Arbutus and Boundary.

Meanwhile Steveston Hwy lines up with 72nd avenue and 72 divided 6 is 12 so that means Steveston Hwy is 12 miles north of the border while Bridgeport road is another 4 miles north and it lines up with 104th Avenue in Surrey! And 104th is 104 furlongs north of the border which means it's 68,640 feet north of the border.

Where else do you see Gunter's Chain in action?

The typical lot is 33x122 which is half a chain by two chains (minus 10 feet for the alley). The average street width is 66' (4 lanes) or 99' (6 lanes). Not everything follows this - some parts of Vancouver were CRP lands and they used a 100' chain which led to 50' lots being the standard (but with 120' depth - presumably their lanes were 22' wide instead of the standard 20').

TBD: Why is 168th street called 168th street when it's the starting point?

More:

https://kumtuks.ca/living-in-gunters-world/
https://richmondarchives.ca/category...s-in-richmond/

Why did you go down this rabbit hole ? Pretty awesome info but weird niche history

Short answer: :alone:

Longer answer: This stuff is the intersection of my interests in maps and urban planning - I love maps and I love studying urban planning especially how things came to be.

There's a couple folks on YT that do videos about how city layouts came to be and I nerd out over those a lot (https://www.youtube.com/@DanielsimsSteiner). The stuff on why Tokyo, London, LA etc are the way they are is super interesting IMO.

For this particular rabbit hole it started with me asking (once again) why Burnaby's street grid is so fucked up and somehow I ended up in Richmond (it helped that Richmond Nature Park had a display showing how Richmond was formed too).

I read somewhere that the 50' lots were designed for the west side to keep the coloured folk east of Ontario to the "affordable" 33' lots.

Won't have coloured neighbors if they can't afford to buy the big lots.

Racism by design.

Shaughnessy (which was CPR land) was definitely designed with big lots partly for that (same with the British Properties) - they both had covenants for a long time that forbade the sale to coloured folks. The 50' lots around Shaughnessy were definitely another barrier to keeping out the slant eyes and darkies.

Nothing wrong with angry ass white people ! At least they knew how to drive their model T's.

I was like 9 before the original HK invasion in Richmond, still remember all the kids showing up in weird ass track suits with no English, some of them are still my friends today.

I remember Richmond being full of sections of unpaved dirt joining roads between neighborhoods and being extremely sleepy. Lansdowne and Richmond Square/Centre (2 malls that joined into 1) were not even open on Sundays. In fact almost nothing was besides Boston Pizza lol!

Biggest initial change of Asian people coming over was food and opening hours.