Unbuilt Victoria celebrates the city that is, and laments the city that could have been.

For most people, resident and visitor alike, Victoria, British Columbia, is a time capsule of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. From a modest fur-trading post of the Hudson s Bay Company it grew to be the province s major trading centre. Then the selection of Vancouver as the terminus of the transcontinental railway in the 1880s, followed by a smallpox epidemic that closed the port in the 1890s, resulted in decline.

Victoria succeeded in reinventing itself as a tourist...