Currie Barracks

The Atlas

You will learn Currie by its street signs before you learn it by its blocks. Flanders. Normandy. Dieppe. Battleford. The names are a reading list, and after a month of turning onto them you catch yourself looking things up. Then the sandstone-coloured buildings resolve into a pattern, the parade square opens on your left, and the whole neighbourhood turns out to have been laid out around a rectangle of grass that has been there since 1935.

Grounds

The land sits west of Crowchild Trail on flat ground, chosen because it was flat, since an army wanted a drill field and later an airstrip. The parade square holds the centre and the community is arranged off it. Flanders Avenue and Battleford Avenue carry the shops. Normandy Drive and Dieppe Drive carry the newer residential blocks out to Quesnay Wood Drive, where the brewery sits. The buildings that survived the base are low and wide, built to a 1930s public standard, and the new construction beside them has been held to their proportions, which we check on every new block that opens. Valour Park holds the west, Alexandria Park sits north of the square, Victoria Cross Park takes a corner, and a dog run on Normandy Drive catches much of the neighbourhood on foot.

The Government of Canada put $1.6 million into a military base here in 1934 and named it for General Sir Arthur Currie, who had commanded the Canadian Corps in the First World War and had died the year before. It became the largest military establishment in Alberta. An airstrip went in during the Second World War and closed in 1964. The base was folded into Canadian Forces Base Calgary in 1966, decommissioned in 1998 and handed to Canada Lands Company, which approved a master plan in 2001 and launched the residential development publicly in 2010. Princess Elizabeth reviewed troops on the square in 1951. The square is still there, and so are the Bennett Building of 1935 and the stables of 1936, and we still give directions off all three.

Homes

Currie Barracks carries some of the newest housing in the inner-city ring, and it reads that way from the sidewalk. Townhouse rows, stacked flats, mid-rise condominium buildings and a growing count of detached and semi-detached houses, almost all of it built since 2010 and much of it since 2018. The trade here is legible and unusual, and we state it plainly because the district does not. You give up the century house and the mature elm, and you give up the possibility of finding something the market overlooked, because the market and the buildings arrived on the same schedule. What you get is a floor plan drawn this decade, a building envelope built to current code, a lane behind the house and a street that was designed as a street rather than inherited as one. Garages open onto lanes and the parking is mostly underneath. The sorting happens by building type, so a stacked flat off Battleford and a detached house on Dieppe sit four minutes apart and look at the same square from opposite sides. Buyers who want character buy east in Garrison Woods, where the previous phase of the same land went up in the 1990s.

Everyday

The commercial ground floors along Flanders Avenue do more work than their size suggests. The stables building of 1936 now holds a distillery with a cocktail bar, a restaurant with a patio, a wine shop and a brewing company, all inside one designated shell, which is a reuse rather than a renovation and reads as one from the street. Wild Rose Brewery keeps a taproom on Quesnay Wood Drive with a kitchen and hours that run to eleven. An inn operates out of the officers' quarters beside its garden. The Military Museums sit a few minutes east on Crowchild Trail, technically over the boundary in Garrison Woods, open daily with eight galleries. Mount Royal University sits directly south in Lincoln Park, which puts a library, a concert hall, a food court and evening courses inside a walk. The square itself carries the weekend traffic, dogs and strollers and somebody's parents being shown around, which is how we would show it too.

Edges

Crowchild Trail closes the east, Lincoln Park and the ATCO lands take over south, and the remaining base ground runs west and north. Every boundary here is a road or an old fence line, and the fence lines are the interesting ones, because this shape was drawn by the Department of National Defence rather than by a subdivision plan. East across the old base, Garrison Woods carries the 1990s phase of the same redevelopment and the museums with it. Further east, Marda Loop runs the shopping street this community borrows. North, Richmond holds the older grid above Richmond Road. The wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.

The Currie Barracks Edit

Where to start. Hours move, so check before you go.

The parade square
Designated, and there since 1935. Every street around it bends to it.

The stables at 2566 Flanders Avenue
A 1936 building now carrying a distillery, a restaurant, a wine shop and a brewing company.

Wild Rose Brewery
On Quesnay Wood Drive. Taproom and kitchen, eleven to eleven six days a week.

Victoria Cross Park
A small square of grass with a large name. Read the name.

We keep the listings on the neighbourhood page, updated as the market moves. Start with Currie Barracks homes for sale.