A brief history of UBC’s campus

Hear that construction? It’s a sign that UBC’s campus is evolving — something that it has been doing since Point Grey was selected as the site of the UBC campus in 1910, and even before then.

UBC is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, particularly the Musqueam First Nation. The land also belonged to the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. In other words, no treaty was ever signed between the First Nations and the government that officially designated the land as belonging to the province. Today, we attempt to reconcile this theft with a land acknowledgement before all major events to remind us of whose land we are on.

Point Grey was initially established by the British government as a colonial admiralty reserve, presumably for strategic reasons related to protecting English Bay and the Fraser River estuary. It was selected as the site of the UBC campus about half a century later, but it was not the first campus location for the university.

The formal construction of permanent buildings officially began in 1914, though construction was halted with the outbreak of World War I with only land-clearance and the frame of the Science Building completed. The university moved into the buildings of the former McGill University College

of British Columbia (which had been the first post-secondary education institution in BC) in the Fairview neighbourhood of Vancouver.

By 1920, the buildings in Fairview were no longer sufficient for the growing student body. However, it took a student-led, province-wide publicity campaign that culminated in “The Great Trek” — a march from downtown Vancouver to Point Grey — in 1922 before construction resumed.

Lectures officially began at the Point Grey campus on September 22, 1925. At that point, the campus consisted of the Science Building (today, part of the Chemistry Building), the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, a power plant and nine “temporary” buildings — many of which are still in use today. These include what are now known as the Arts One, Geography and Mathematics Buildings. The Iona and Chancellor buildings, built as part of the Vancouver School of Theology, were completed in 1927, before the Great Depression and World War II set in and slowed progress on campus.

The list of buildings added to campus in the second half of the twentieth century is long, to say the least. Notable additions are the War Memorial Gym — built in 1949/50 and officially dedicated to the family members of service personnel who lost their lives in the two world wars — as well as many of the buildings you’ll be taking class in this year. Student residence buildings also vary in their building date — most buildings at Place Vanier and Totem Park were built in the 1960s, while Orchard Commons just opened in 2016.

UBC’s campus wasn’t built overnight. In fact, it’s taken over a century to get to where we are today — and it’s still changing, thanks to the hammering sounds you heard while walking to lunch today. U