1. Wolseley
2. The Exchange District
3. West Broadway

 

As neighbourhoods go, Wolseley is more of the quiet, underrated part of the city that inspires heartfelt devotion but doesn’t often get brazen shoutouts.

But this is the second year that readers have chosen the so-called Granola Belt as their fave. Wolseley’s charm unseated the previous winner, the jam-packed and bustling Osborne Village, but not because Wolseley is the new Osborne. 

Those who choose Wolseley are often looking for that calm community feel.

“There’s a sense of openness and inclusion,” Grant Pastuck says. Pastuck is the owner of Prairie Sky Books, which has been holding down a Westminster Avenue storefront since 1978.

“There’s a lot about Wolseley that attracts people that are … interested in a more human level of existence,” Pastuck says. 

Though he’s next to the busiest intersection in all of Wolseley, Pastuck enjoys looking out his window to see trees and people walking their dogs, not car traffic.

That sense of connection is what drew Giorgo Mantas and Rob Bohay, co-owners of Verde juice bar, to Wolseley.

“We didn’t want the busy, busy, crazy street and everyone going wild. We wanted to get to know the neighbours in the neighbourhood and become friends with people,” Mantas says. “You don’t just know your next-door neighbour here, you know everyone on the street.”

Verde is the newest kid on the small stretch of Westminster that houses most of Wolseley’s commercial ventures. It’s full of “shops with business owners from Winnipeg, making a living,” Bohay says.

Bohay and Mantas have made fast friends with many of the other shopkeepers. In Wolseley, it’s not a competition.

While other neighbourhoods move and change rapidly, Wolseley is subject more to “the will of the people, rather than the will of the city,” Pastuck says.

“There’s no other neighbourhood in the city like it.”

Published in Volume 71, Number 13 of The Uniter (December 1, 2016)