Our current poet-in-residence, Elizabeth Fevyer takes her kids to Toronto and wonders where everyone is. 

We arrive in Toronto one evening at the start of February half-term, as swathes of North America are recovering from some of the heaviest snowstorms in decades. We’ve barely left the airport taxi rank before one of my sons points out the banks of snow, ploughed high on the sides of the roads.  I mentally congratulate us for packing sturdy snow boots and the thickest, downiest, winter coats imaginable.  We’ll be just like the locals, I think.  

We reach our hotel, deep in downtown, under the concrete-and-neon gaze of the CN Tower.  Giddy with the kind of semi-conscious delirium which is inevitable after being awake for almost twenty-four hours, we practically somersault across the neatly ploughed and gritted pavement and straight into bed.

The next morning, we head out to explore the city.  It’s cold, well below freezing, but thanks to our mega-thick coats (made in Canada, naturellement), we are as snug as a family of bugs on a beach holiday in Cancun.  How nice it is, I think, as we weave our way effortlessly through the monolithic grids of the financial district, not to be constantly dodging in and out of a sea of pedestrians.  How unlike London.   

Every pavement seems to have been ploughed and gritted so meticulously that our snow boots are starting to feel a bit like overkill.  There are a few dogs out-and-about, enjoying their morning walkies with their humans, their little feet cosy in their tiny dog-booties.  The streets are, otherwise, fairly empty.  Where is everyone?  I wonder, as we turn into yet another almost-deserted street.  

The answer, of course, is that they are all underground.  In the PATH to be precise.  All over downtown, we’ve been spotting multicoloured PATH signs above doorways and at the entrances to what look like underpasses.  I’ve heard about this place.  It’s a kind of big underground shopping mall, I tell my kids, who seem to perk up at the mention of shopping.  And there are food courts, too.  They perk up some more.  It’s nearly lunchtime, so we decide to enter the world of PATH in search of something to eat.

To describe PATH as a big underground shopping mall is to tell the truth whilst entirely misrepresenting it.  Yes, there are shops.  Yes, it is big.  But ‘big’ is a relative concept and, in this case (thirty kilometers of tunnels and concourses and around 1,200 shops and restaurants), it doesn’t really seem to cut it.  A better description of PATH might be to say that it is another world.  A whole other subterranean dimension.  Think science-fiction movie, set in a post-apocalyptic-all-too-near-future, where the surface of the earth has become uninhabitable.  This is, perhaps, nearer to the reality.

Having descended, we swiftly join the slipstream of office workers (some in short-sleeves, many in impractical footwear, none wearing coats), as they make their way along the pristine polished floors, either towards the nearest food court or back to their desks.  PATH connects shops, offices, travel interchanges and much, much more.  In bad weather, many Torontonians can eschew the outside world almost entirely, moving between work and home through its climate-controlled halls, tunnels and travel links.  It’s busy down here.  Lunch-hour busy.  And it’s warm.  Too warm for what now feels like an entirely misguided coat-choice.  Spot the tourists, Mum.  I take my coat off and carry it.  It is as heavy as a toddler.

It is hard to navigate PATH when you’re not familiar with it.  Even locals complain of getting lost and dead-ends, and our little group has to double-back several times.  There are maps, but without the street signs and building landmarks of the above-ground world, it is difficult to know where we are, or even in which direction we’re pointing.  We begin to navigate using shopfronts as reference points.  I’m sure we’ve passed this Tim Horton’s already, sighs a son.  Have we gone around in a giant circle, or are the shops repeating themselves?  Both could be true.  Both carry infinite opportunities for the kids to ask for snacks.  There are so many places to eat in PATH, the concern is that we’ll stop somewhere, only to wish we’d walked for another ten minutes to where another, better-looking, food court appears, like a mirage, on the horizon of the shiny concourse.  In this sense, PATH is the internet-dating of the shopping mall-world, always teasing at something more promising ahead if you just keep on looking.

It’s not all about shopping and eating, though.  PATH is an essential part of Toronto’s downtown infrastructure.  An arterial network which keeps the heart of the city beating during the extreme weather months, with up to 200,000 commuters using it daily.  It is also potentially a life-saving space during the harsh winter months, for the city’s significant homeless population.  I would like to understand more about how PATH operates as a ‘Third Space’ and how it interacts with the community and, in particular, the homeless population.  As a patchwork of privately-owned landholdings, I do wonder how likely those members of the community are to get the support and shelter they need, rather than just be moved on. 

Over the next few days, we head down into PATH at various times, dodging snowstorms, catching underground trains and gazing at some of the more aesthetically interesting parts of this vast labyrinth.  For tourists like us, it delivers both functionality and a degree of novelty.  Does it also save us from the extreme weather and jeopardy up on the street above?  Well, yes and no.  It is undoubtedly warmer than on the street, but while we manage to avoid slips and falls on the sub-zero pavements outside, we don’t fare quite so well on the super-polished floors of PATH.  As above, so below.  I blame the snow boots.