Qualla: Burrard Dry Dock

Burrard Dry Dock: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Braveheart, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two gantry cranes stand on the North Vancouver waterfront with nothing left to lift. They are the last working-sized objects on a site that once launched ships into Burrard Inlet at a rate no other yard in Canada could match, and they were kept deliberately, restored and left in place because somebody understood that a plaza with cranes over it tells a story that a plaza without them cannot. Below them, where 14,000 people once clocked in, families eat ice cream. The yard beneath the pavement built more than 450 vessels across nearly a century, and it began with one man making wooden fish boats on False Creek in 1894.

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Image: Braveheart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrard Dry Dock: Twice Burned

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike, CC BY 2.0. Alfred Wallace - Andy, to everyone - started with fishing boats, and in 1909 his boatworks burned down and was abandoned. He had already incorporated Wallace Shipyards in 1905 and moved the following year to a bigger site at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver, directl...

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Image: Mike | CC BY 2.0

Burrard Dry Dock: The First Steel Hulls in Canada

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Braveheart, CC BY-SA 4.0. The First World War transformed a regional boatyard into an industrial concern. Wallace Shipyards took a contract to manufacture shells for 18-pounder guns, then built six large cargo schooners and three freighters for the merchant marine - the first deep-sea steel-hulled ships e...

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Image: Braveheart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrard Dry Dock: A Small Ship with a Long Reach

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike, CC BY 2.0. In 1928 the yard launched something almost comically modest by its own standards: a 104-foot auxiliary schooner for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, designed by Tom Halliday on the model of Roald Amundsen's Maud. She was built of Douglas fir and sheathed in Australian eucalyptu...

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Image: Mike | CC BY 2.0

Burrard Dry Dock: Fourteen Thousand People

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Braveheart, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 1940 and 1945 Burrard Dry Dock became the busiest shipyard in Canada. It built 109 Park and Fort class freighters - Canada's answer to the Liberty ship - along with corvettes, minesweepers, landing ships and Admiralty maintenance vessels of the Beachy Head class, and it c...

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Image: Braveheart | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burrard Dry Dock: Polar 8

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike, CC BY 2.0. Consolidation followed victory. Burrard bought Yarrows of Esquimalt in 1946, the neighbouring North Vancouver Ship Repairs in 1951, and the assets of Victoria Machinery Depot in 1967, closing that yard at once. The Wallace family sold out in 1972 to Cornat Industries, part of the...

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Image: Mike | CC BY 2.0