Pitt Meadows guide
The Town Centre, Harris Road End to End
Harris Road between 119th Avenue and the Lougheed is the only genuinely walkable commercial strip in Pitt Meadows. A walk up it, south to north, with the businesses worth stopping at.
Written by June Tam
The Town Centre is the only part of Pitt Meadows you can genuinely walk. It runs along Harris Road between 119th Avenue and the Lougheed Highway, and the whole strip takes about a quarter of an hour on foot if you take it slowly. That is roughly the scale of the city's ambitions in that direction, and it is no bad thing.
It is not a heritage main street. There is no unbroken wall of storefronts, no cobbles, no restored bank building on the corner. What there is instead is a civic core, a few blocks of low commercial buildings, and a cluster of plazas up where Harris Road meets the highway. Between them sit a large share of the independent businesses in the city.
The West Coast Express stops in the Town Centre, which gives the sidewalk a purpose on weekday mornings that it does not have the rest of the week. Here is the strip, south to north.
The civic block
City Hall, the Family Recreation Centre, Spirit Square and Heritage Hall are all here, and together they come as close to a proper public square as the city gets. It does the job it needs to do: somewhere to sit, some grass, and a hard surface for events.
The Pitt Meadows Farmers Market is the thing that pulls people in from across the city when it is running. It is a small market by regional standards, which is exactly why it works. You can talk to the people who grew what you are buying, and a good number of them farm on the flat land just north of where you are standing.
The middle blocks
North of the civic buildings, Harris Road turns into a working strip of low buildings with parking out front. The Original Lunch Doctor is a counter operation of the kind that outlasts trends because it never had any to begin with. Meadow Sushi is along the same strip, and so is Meadows Pharmacy, which means lunch, dinner and a prescription all sit within a short walk of one another. That is a more useful piece of planning than it sounds.
This is the stretch that rewards walking most. The buildings are unremarkable and the tenants are not, and you will miss half of them at forty kilometres an hour.
Further up the strip
Pitt Meadows Cycle matters more in this city than a bike shop would in most. Pitt Meadows is flat, diked and laced with trails, and this is where people get sorted out before riding the dikes or heading north into the farmland. In a place where the terrain does none of the work for you, a shop that keeps bikes running is basically infrastructure.
The Coffee Pitt is the other one worth knowing on this stretch. It knows its regulars, which tells you plenty about who is actually on this street during the working week.
The highway end
Where Harris Road reaches the Lougheed the character changes. The plazas off Ford Road and 122 Avenue count as Town Centre, and they hold more than their exteriors suggest.
Tomes & Tales Books is out at this end, and it is the sort of bookshop a city this size has no statistical right to keep. The Jolly Coachman Pub is the closest thing Pitt Meadows has to a default answer: a neighbourhood pub that everybody has been to at some point. Austin Fish & Chips does one thing and does not pretend otherwise. The Firehall Bistro is where people book a table when the occasion calls for slightly more than a pub.
How to actually use it
Park once. That is the whole trick. The Town Centre is the only place in Pitt Meadows where you can leave the car in one lot and do four errands on foot, and treating it like a series of drive-throughs wastes the one thing it has going for it.
It is also worth being clear about what the Town Centre is not. It is not where most of the city's retail floor space sits. That is out at Meadowtown, beside Golden Ears Way, and it is mostly national chains doing what national chains do. The Town Centre is smaller, older and considerably more useful. Nineteen thousand people cannot support much more than this, and the honest response is to use what is here rather than mourn what is not.
From the directory
Mentioned in this article
Every place named above has its own page here, with the address, the hours and the nearest station.
Austin Fish & Chips
Fish and chip shop on the Lougheed Highway strip serving English style battered fish and chips with the usual sides. Takeout and delivery, with a small amount of seating.
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Meadow Sushi
Japanese restaurant in the Harris Road shops serving nigiri, rolls, tempura and teriyaki. Dine in, takeout and delivery, with online ordering through its own site. Closed Sundays.
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Meadows Pharmacy
Privately owned neighbourhood pharmacy on Harris Road, listed by HealthLink BC as an independent business. Dispenses prescriptions and helps customers obtain, understand and manage their medications.
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Pitt Meadows Cycle
Full service bike shop on Lougheed Highway selling road, mountain, electric, hybrid and kids bikes, plus components, helmets, apparel, lights and locks. Repairs and services bikes and runs mechanic courses. Closed Mondays.
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Pitt Meadows Farmers Market
Seasonal outdoor market at Spirit Square beside City Hall, running Tuesday afternoons from 2pm to 6pm, June through late September. Local produce, farm goods, baking and small food producers, run by the non-profit Fraser North Farmers Market Society.
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The Coffee Pitt
Independent coffee shop on Harris Road serving espresso and drip coffee, fresh sandwiches and house baked goods including their cinnamon buns, daily from 8am to 5pm. The room can also be booked for small gatherings and events.
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The Firehall Bistro
Independent bistro in a small unit on 122A Avenue just off Harris Road. Table service dining room open for lunch and dinner with a short seasonal menu. Closed Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day.
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The Jolly Coachman Pub
Neighbourhood pub on Ford Road serving Pitt Meadows since 1976. Traditional pub food, daily specials and a full bar, with a private liquor store attached to the same building. Licensed 19 plus, no minors.
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The Original Lunch Doctor
Counter service sandwich shop on Harris Road doing soups, salads, sandwiches and baked goods. Open Tuesday to Saturday until 3pm, closed Sunday and Monday. Also caters local offices and events.
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Tomes & Tales Books
An independent bookshop on Ford Road carrying new and secondhand fiction and non fiction across most genres, plus tarot decks and other metaphysical items. Closed Mondays, open Tuesday through Sunday.
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Who wrote this
Nell Vanderveen
Nell Vanderveen grew up on a blueberry farm north of the Alouette and lives near Osprey Village. She writes Pitt Meadows Local and walks the dike from Harris Road most mornings before the traffic starts.
