Description of Historic Place

St. Edmund's Church is a wood-frame church with a prominent tower and steeple in the centre of the front facade. The church is located at the west end of Ottawa Gardens, and the shift in the street grid at this location gives the church landmark status in the neighbourhood.

Heritage Value

St. Edmund's Church is valued as a part of the Ottawa Gardens subdivision, designed to attract affluent and prominent families to the North Shore of Burrard Inlet. Planning and development was initiated in 1906 by the North Vancouver Land and Improvement Company. Prestige was guaranteed through minimum construction cost standards and restrictions on buildings and landscaping. Ottawa Gardens is now part of a rectilinear system of boulevards and parks known as North Vancouver's "Green Necklace," which also includes Grand Boulevard, Victoria Park and Mahon Park. This church, constructed at the east end of Ottawa Gardens, punctuates the vista looking west along the central boulevard.

St. Edmund's Church is valued as a testament to the long history of the Roman Catholic congregation in North Vancouver, and for its connection with the first Catholics - the missionary priests of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (O.M.I.) - to arrive in western Canada. The O.M.I. was instrumental in bringing Roman Catholicism to western Canada and the Canadian north. O.M.I. missionary priests frequently built churches and colleges and gave them over to secular clergy. St. Edmund's was established in 1910 by Father J. A. Bedard, and has operated continuously ever since. A Catholic School was erected to the south in 1911, expanding the teaching function of the Order, and a large rectory was built adjacent to the church in 1913. All three of these structures are extant.

St. Edmund's Church is valued for its architectural style, which reflects the format and layout of the Oblate missions in northern British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Missionary priests created Gothic Revival churches, with a tower, steeple, and a central entrance flanked by windows with Gothic arches. St. Edmund's, like other churches of the O.M.I., has a lavishly decorated interior.

Source: Heritage Planning Files, City of North Vancouver

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of St. Edmund's Church include its:
- regular rectangular plan form, imposing scale and symmetrical massing
- prominent location at the western end of Ottawa Gardens
- grouping with the adjacent St. Edmund's Catholic School and Rectory
- octagonal entry tower and steeple projecting from front facade
- sculpture niche in entry tower
- Gothic-arched stained glass windows
- steeply pitched front gable roof with lower pitched roofs over later side aisles
- small pitched roof over central front entry
- original wooden cladding under later coat of stucco
- original interior features such as the wooden ceiling panelling, wooden pews and wooden choir
- interior decorative elements such as paintings of the stations of the Cross on the aisle walls, paintings of the apostles on the spandrels of the nave arcade and Byzantine-influenced art work in the apse