Moving to London ON

Health care & medical research

London Health Sciences Centre (Victoria, University and Children's hospitals), St. Joseph's Health Care London, Lawson Research Institute, Robarts Research Institute, Verspeeten Family Cancer Centre, CSTAR

LHSC alone employs nearly 15,000 physicians, residents and staff and treated over a million patients last year, serving a region far larger than the city. Between LHSC and St. Joseph's, health care is the base of the local economy and the sector that hires most consistently — and the one where professional registration, not immigration, is the real gate.

Education & research

Western University, Fanshawe College, Thames Valley District School Board, London District Catholic School Board, Brescia and Huron university colleges

Western supports roughly 10,000 jobs and its medical school is tied into every hospital in the city; Fanshawe's downtown and main campuses put tens of thousands of students into the rental market on a September and May cycle. Thames Valley DSB, with around 11,900 staff, is one of the largest employers in southwestern Ontario in its own right.

Advanced manufacturing & defence

General Dynamics Land Systems–Canada, Diamond Aircraft, Trudell Medical International, Starlim, Northern Digital

General Dynamics Land Systems–Canada builds light armoured vehicles here and runs the engineering, procurement and in-service support behind them; Diamond Aircraft has built composite aircraft at London International Airport since 1992. This is a smaller, higher-skill manufacturing base than the auto-parts economy of Windsor or Cambridge.

Food processing & agri-food

Maple Leaf Foods, Dr. Oetker, Nestlé Canada, Labatt Brewing, Cargill, Bimbo Canada

Maple Leaf's $660-million poultry plant south of the 401 was built to employ around 1,450 people, and Dr. Oetker's London plant is the North American hub for its pizza business at roughly 400,000 pizzas a day with about 430 staff. London sits in the middle of some of the most productive farmland in Canada, which is why the processors are here.

Insurance, financial services & credit unions

Canada Life, Libro Credit Union, Sun Life, Sanctuary/Ivey-linked funds, Info-Tech Research Group

London Life was founded here in 1874 and the successor Canada Life operation remains one of the largest white-collar employers downtown. Libro Credit Union is headquartered in the city and is a genuine alternative to the national banks for day-to-day banking and small mortgages in southwestern Ontario.

Technology, digital & research services

Info-Tech Research Group, Voices.com, Northern Commerce, Autodata Solutions, TechAlliance, Western Accelerator

Smaller than Waterloo Region an hour east, and real — Info-Tech Research Group is headquartered on Ridout Street North and Voices.com was built here. TechAlliance is the regional innovation centre and the fastest route into the local network. Expect a market where everyone knows everyone rather than one with constant job-hopping.

Landmark · 442 Adelaide Street North

The boarding house where Frederick Banting woke at two in the morning in October 1920 and wrote down the idea that became insulin. A small museum in an ordinary brick house, with the Flame of Hope burning in the garden outside.

Local tip: It is easy to walk past and it is the most consequential address in the city by a wide margin. Go for the bedroom and the notebook page rather than the displays, and understand what the flame is: it is meant to be extinguished only when a cure for diabetes is found. Locals mostly have not been, which tells you something about the city and nothing about the site.

Food · 130 King Street, downtown

A market on the same block since 1845, rebuilt in 1999 — greengrocers, butchers, a fishmonger, bakeries and enough hot food counters to make it the default downtown lunch, with an outdoor farmers' market on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Local tip: This is where you buy food properly rather than at a supermarket, and it is the fastest way to work out what southwestern Ontario actually grows. The skating rink outside runs all winter and is free. Go on a Saturday morning, then walk five minutes to the Forks.

Neighborhood · Across the river south of downtown

A crossroads of independent shops, a bakery, a bookshop and a couple of good restaurants, wrapped in the best-preserved late-Victorian residential streets in the city, ten minutes' walk from downtown.

Local tip: Walk the side streets rather than only the commercial block — Bruce, Craig, Askin — because the housing stock is the point. It is also the clearest illustration of London's price gradient: a one-bed here costs meaningfully more than the same flat a fifteen-minute walk east, purely for the address.

Nature · West London, along the Thames

The city's largest park — some 300 hectares of riverside trails, meadow and gardens strung along the Thames, with a small children's attraction, Storybook Gardens, inside it.

Local tip: The Thames Valley Parkway runs through it, a continuous multi-use path that follows the river for tens of kilometres across the city and is how you actually get around London on a bike. Join it at Springbank and ride east through the Forks to Fanshawe; you will barely touch a road.

Neighborhood · Dundas Street east of Adelaide

The old east-end commercial main street — a century of low brick shopfronts now holding coffee roasters, a brewery, restaurants and a year-round Saturday farmers' market in the Western Fair District's Confederation Building.

Local tip: The cheapest walkable address in London and the one visibly changing, which cuts both ways — this is also where the city's street homelessness and drug crisis is most concentrated, and you should walk it at different times of day before signing anything. The market on a Saturday morning is genuinely excellent and unlike anything else in the city.

Nature · North-east London, on the dammed Thames

A large reservoir behind the Fanshawe Dam with beaches, trails, camping and a reconstructed nineteenth-century Upper Canadian village of some thirty buildings moved here from around the region.

Local tip: The dam is the reason London has not had a repeat of the 1937 flood, which is worth knowing when you are looking at how close a rental sits to the river. The lake itself is the closest thing to a swimming beach in the city, and the village is much better than its name suggests — real trades demonstrated by people who know them.