Toronto Guide
Toronto
The University of Toronto
A short walk to the west of the Ontario Legislative Assembly Building stand the various faculties of the University of Toronto, opened in 1843 and the province's most prestigious academic institution. The university's older buildings, with their quadrangles, ivy-covered walls and Gothic interiors, deliberately evoke Oxbridge with Hart House, at the west end of Wellesley Street on Hart House Circle, being the best example. Hart House is attached to the Soldier's Tower, a neo-Gothic memorial erected in 1924 to honour those students who had died in World War I. It adjoins an arcaded gallery, which is inscribed with a list of the dead and Canadian John McCrae's In Flanders Fields, arguably the war's best-known poem. Optimistically, the builders of the memorial didn't leave any space to commemorate the dead of any further war – so the names of the university students killed in World War II had to be inscribed on the walls under the arches at the foot of the tower.