Two old cores in a mostly modern town
Whitby is honest about being a newer town, and that matters for how we approach it. Roughly forty-five per cent of the housing here dates from 1991 or later, with only about eight per cent predating 1961, so the town as a whole is not old housing stock. The exceptions are sharply defined and worth knowing. Werden’s Plan in downtown Whitby is a heritage conservation district of around two hundred and fifty properties and holds the greatest number of historic residential streetscapes in the downtown. Brooklin is the other, a district of a hundred and sixty-nine properties in a village founded in 1840 around a flour mill on Lynde Creek and renamed at a meeting of about three hundred inhabitants in August 1847. Those two cores carry Victorian fabric on plank subfloor. The north Whitby subdivisions off Taunton and Rossland are a different proposition entirely.