Swansea Mews and Swansea Public School

A new start in Metro Housing: While a few kids made inappropriate remarks at school and the neighbour used to help herself to vegetables from her mom’s small garden, Marcia Drummond has overwhelmingly fond memories of growing up in Swansea near High Park in the 1970s.

By Marcia Drummond

Our family moved to Swansea Mews (“the Mews”) in March 1975. Construction was mostly complete and families were moving in every day. As children, we were happy to move to a brand new townhome and our Mom enjoyed planting tomatoes and other vegetables in the little garden that each upper-level unit had. We didn't get to reap much of our crops, because our neighbour directly across from us would do it for us at night. My Mom did not give up the planting in the hopes that we would eventually get even a few tomatoes while feeding the neighbours.

The playground at the front of the property was an important place for us to meet and play with our new neighbours and we looked forward to spending our weekends and summer days there. We also socialized at a smaller park at the north side of the property and at the recreation center (“the rec”) which had a slide and a splash pad. The rec is located on the east side of the Mews on what we affectionately called the “back road.” In the summer, the rec would provide crafting sessions, movies and even summer trips to Wasaga Beach. Those trips would include picking up other kids at the West Mall Metro Housing complex before heading north to Wasaga. As children, the concept of Metro Housing was lost on us. All we concerned ourselves with was meeting and playing with kids our age with little regard for race.

Swansea School was where our circle of friends widened, but also where I became acutely aware that I was different from most of the other kids at the school due to the colour of my skin. One particular remark that I remember to this day is, "Oops, I burnt another one!" It was the punchline from a "joke" - What did God say whenever he created a Black person? The Mews is multinational and even though some racial tensions rose up from time to time, they were more easily squashed because there was a pretty even split between White and non-White residents.

Swansea School was an interesting melting pot of students hailing from the Swansea Mews Metro Housing complex to the affluent neighbourhoods of Riverside, Southport, South Kingsway and Grenadier Heights. Some of those school friendships gave us the opportunity to attend sleepovers in those neighbourhoods and summer holiday or long weekend trips to cottages up north. On a high note, these early Swansea School experiences have proven to be very beneficial for me as an adult. I am not consumed by race in my everyday life and I am often surprised when someone remarks to me that I was the only Black person in a room or a meeting, because I just don’t notice it – thank you Swansea School!

Track and field and cross-country running were the highlight of the Spring and Fall months for me at Swansea. I competed for our school, both locally and citywide in high jump, 50 m and 100 m dashes as well as 4 x 200 m relays. Cross-country running from the bottom of the hill, through Rennie Park and over to High Park was fun, though I only ran with students from Swansea and sometimes Humberside. I remember one race through High Park where I was about 300 m from the finish line and had nothing left. I was about to give up when some of my friends and fellow students cheered me on from the sidelines and I was able to pass up about 4 or 5 people who were in front of me and complete the race.

Winters at Swansea School meant skating at Rennie Park and sliding down the hill on various items – the Dominion grocery bags were a favourite, because they had good slip and were readily available. Groups of us would walk from the Mews to the school on weekends and spend hours sliding down and walking back up that hill. On a visit to the school back in August 2016, I visited the hill and was amazed at how steep it wasn’t. My child’s mind recalls a much steeper hill with way more distance to cover from top to bottom. I noted the beautiful view of downtown Toronto, especially the CN Tower, which we never really focused on as kids. I also noted that additional buildings existed at the school, including a swimming pool.

A highlight towards the end of the school year was the annual Fun Fair. It happened on a Saturday and was a major outing for us in the Mews. Large groups of our fellow Swansea students plus others, who went to Runnymede and Annette, would walk up Windermere Avenue to Swansea School. We’d spend the money that we had playing games and buying books and food. When we were done, we’d walk down Windermere Avenue to Budgell Terrace so that we could hang out for a few hours in Ormskirk Park. After hanging out we’d head down Southport Street to Windermere Place then across Windermere Avenue to the Mews. I haven’t thought about the Fun Fair in decades.

High Park and Grenadier Pond were additional recreational areas for Swansea Mews residents. We’d take bags of bread to the pond to feed the Mallard ducks and Canada Geese. This pastime was something we enjoyed with our parents or our peers. The braver ones among us would try to have the birds eat the bread directly from our hands. Hanging out at Grenadier Pond was a strangely peaceful and relaxing outing even though we were just steps. away from the streetcars and traffic on the Queensway and the Gardiner Expressway. At other times, groups of us would ride our bikes to and through High Park and enjoy the scenery. As an adult, I now know that we were fortunate to have such beauty at our disposal; as kids these places were just additional play areas.

Published by permission of the contributing author, Marcia Drummond, and author/editor, Chris Higgins, from the book, “BRICK by BRICK: Swansea Public School, 1890-2020."