Montreal I at least had heard of. Toronto. A city. In Canada. Quite a big one, it seemed, riding the bus in from Washington, one afternoon in 1967.

It consisted largely, I found, of the most amiable sort of repurposed semi-ruins. A vast Victorian colonial seashell of blackened brick, shot through with big, grim grey bones of earnest civic Modernism. I marvelled that such an odd place could have existed without my having heard of it. North of New England, all this baroque, mad brick; sandstone gargoyles, red trams, the Queen's portrait everywhere.

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