
High Park
Sprawling lakeside park mixing oak savannah, cherry blossoms, a zoo, and a founders ironwork tomb.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to High Park in Toronto follows John Howard, the surveyor who turned his hilltop sheep farm into the city's park under one condition — that it stay free to the public, forever — in exchange for a small city pension. It also traces his fixation on the historic ironwork railing from St Paul's Cathedral in London, lost when the ship carrying it home sank in the St Lawrence River, and how far he went trying to recover it. Listen for what he made of it near Colborne Lodge, his old cottage on the hill.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Colborne Lodge
Restored 1837 Regency cottage turned house museum, overlooking a lake and said to be haunted.
Guild Park & Gardens
Bluff-top sculpture park displaying rescued facades, columns and reliefs from demolished city landmarks.
Edwards Gardens
Ravine garden of manicured lawns, ponds and a rockery, built atop a nineteenth-century mill site.
Toronto Botanical Garden
Themed contemporary gardens beside a ravine estate once transformed by a private rockery and waterwheel.
Trinity Bellwoods Park
Leafy downtown park built over a buried creek ravine, with hidden foundations of a vanished Gothic college beneath its lawns.
Spadina Museum
Restored Edwardian mansion and gardens tracing three generations of a banking family.