Description of Historic Place

The Victoria Road Residence is a small, one-storey, late-Victorian cottage located in one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, just south of the downtown core. The historic place is confined to the building footprint.

Heritage Value

Built around 1892, the Victoria Road Residence is a very good example of a late-Victorian cottage with superior carpenter ornamentation, including turned columns, jig-cut detailing and decorative diagonal planking.

An extremely rare, early example of company housing, the Victoria Road Residence is a direct link with Nanaimo’s coal mining history. In Nanaimo, unlike most coal communities, coal companies built very little employee housing, preferring instead to sell workers raw land. This situation afforded many miners some degree of financial and psychological independence. This building, although an exception to the rule, represents the complex, socioeconomic relationships between local coal companies and their workers.

Source: City of Nanaimo Planning Department

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Victoria Road Residence include:

- all of the elements of a small late-Victorian cottage with carpenter ornamentation, as expressed in the L-shaped plan, entry porch, horizontal wooden drop siding, double-hung wooden-sash windows, turned columns, jig-cut detailing and decorative diagonal planking
- the building's location in one of Nanaimo's oldest neighbourhoods, just south of the downtown core