Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought Them in 1970s Vancouver
Document Type
Book
Date of Original Version
2018
Department
English
Abstract
Mudflat Dreaming tells the story of two communities on Vancouver's waterfront fringes in the 1970s.
On the North Shore, a counter-cultural village of float houses and shacks on stilts sprouted on the estuarial Maplewood Mudflats. A few miles to the south, on the southern banks of the Fraser River above New Westminster, the long-established Bridgeview neighbourhood was mired in an endless battle with local city council for basic amenities.
As a teenager, Jean Walton lived just up the hill from Bridgeview, but it was only much later that the author learned about the struggle embroiling her near neighbours, as well as its connection to the Maplewood Mudflat squatter community — not to mention Malcolm Lowry and Habitat 76.
Walton's way into these stories is through a few documentary films made at the time about Bridgeview and Maplewood, as well as Robert Altman's breakthrough feature film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, shot just a few miles up the mountainside from the Maplewood Mudflats.
Citation/Publisher Attribution
Walton, Jean. "Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought Them in 1970s Vancouver." (2018). https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/eng_facpubs/93