The steam clock at Water and Cambie is not Victorian. It was built in 1977 by horologist Raymond Saunders, and its whistles are tuned to the Westminster chimes. Tourists queue for it hourly. Few realise the antique district around it is older than the clock by more than a century. Gastown takes its name from John Deighton, a Yorkshire riverboat pilot nicknamed "Gassy Jack" for his talkativeness. He arrived in 1867 with a barrel of whiskey and a promise of free drink to any mill worker who helped him raise a saloon. The building went up in twenty-four hours. A settlement gathered around it. In 1886 the town incorporated as Vancouver, and within weeks the Great Fire reduced almost all of it to ash. What stands today is the rebuild: brick and cast iron, warehouses raised in the boom that followed the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus. A gastown walking food tour vancouver route traces those streets almost exactly. The district declined for most of the twentieth century. By the 1960s it was a skid road of flophouses and shuttered warehouses, slated in part for a freeway that was never built. Citizen opposition killed the plan. In 1971 the province designated Gastown a historic area, and in 2009 the federal government named it a National Historic Site of Canada. Restoration followed slowly, then all at once. What survives is a coherent stretch of late-Victorian commercial architecture rare on the West Coast. Romanesque Revival arches on Water Street. The Hotel Europe of 1909, a flatiron wedge of reinforced concrete, among the first of its kind in Canada. Ornamental lampposts, hanging baskets, granite setts relaid to period specification. The Byrnes Block occupies the site of Deighton's second saloon. Food arrived as the district's second act. Chefs took the low ceilings and exposed timber of former dry-goods warehouses and filled them with Pacific Northwest cooking: spot prawns, Fraser Valley cheese, Ocean Wise salmon, coffee roasted within a few blocks. Vancouver's culinary walking tour culture grew from that density — a dozen serious kitchens inside a ten-minute radius. The neighbourhood itself costs nothing to enter, open around the clock at 00:00–23:59 daily, with guided tastings ticketed separately. Any gastown walking food tour vancouver tour is, in effect, a reading of the rebuild — each stop a room that used to hold something else entirely.