Kensington-Chinatown

About Kensington-Chinatown

Kensington-Chinatown is Toronto at its most eclectic, layered, and alive. Kensington Market, the neighbourhood's beating heart, is a labyrinth of narrow streets packed with vintage clothing shops, cheese merchants, spice vendors, Caribbean patty shops, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants representing cuisines from every continent. The market has been a landing place for successive waves of immigrants since the early 1900s, and that history lives on in its gloriously chaotic streetscape. Spilling eastward into Chinatown along Spadina Avenue, the neighbourhood shifts into one of North America's most vibrant Chinese commercial districts, where dim sum palaces, herbal medicine shops, and fish markets line the sidewalks. Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market close the streets to cars and fill them with buskers, food vendors, and thousands of people celebrating the neighbourhood's free-spirited ethos. Despite gentrification pressures, Kensington-Chinatown remains fiercely independent, a place where counterculture and multiculturalism have always gone hand in hand.