Every Friday from 4 pm to 8 pm throughout the summer, the Victoria Beer Society (VBS) hosts Fridays at the Station, a community event featuring live music, food, and craft vendors. Across from Floyd’s Diner in Langford, you’ll see the mobile beer truck that has become a staple of VBS events serving a selection of beer on tap from local breweries, which seems to be constantly changing each week. To the left for about half a block stretches a line of vendor booths, serving fresh food and coffee, and selling art and other handmade crafts. To the right you’ll see a handful of picnic tables set up in front of a small enclosed stage.
Above the sounds of the excited chatter of patrons milling about, laughing, and basking in the sun, musical notes of acoustic guitar, bass, saxophone, and drums may be heard, accompanied by vocal melodies singing smooth jazz, folk, or country. The lineup of talent changes each week, and, for me, the experience of sitting under a shaded umbrella, reading a book, and listening to unknown local talent while sampling the finest beer the city has to offer is a little slice of contentment at the end of a tired week.
This experience highlights for me a lack of community events in what is ironically named the Western Communities. Over the past couple of decades, Langford has grown from a small redneck town in the ’90s (where I spent some of my childhood) to a bustling, expanding, gentrified city. Sadly, the expansion has mostly been in the upwards direction, with large corporate entities quickly and shoddily constructing countless multi-story apartment buildings that they can then charge exorbitant rates for.
The problem with this predatory growth structure is that it actively discourages community. Apartment buildings seal their inhabitants off from their neighbours into small disconnected cells, and you can live for years in a building without knowing anybody. It encourages a culture of exclusion, rather than the open, inclusive feeling of proper suburban communities, such as Fairfield, James Bay, Oak Bay, or Sidney.
Regular events such as the Moss St. Market, where people are encouraged to come out and meet their neighbours, trade, and foster a sense of interpersonal connectedness, are important to any community. They dispel the feeling of “stranger danger” wherein we close off from those around us, looking with suspicion upon our neighbours rather than getting to know them. They remind us that communities used to be comprised of small towns and villages where everybody knew each other, for better or for worse; where people came together to bring in the harvest and have potluck meals.
It’s clear that even such a small initiative toward fostering an inclusive community environment has a huge impact on the people that it reaches. When I share a beer next to a total stranger and we have a brief conversation about our favourites of the many breweries Vancouver Island has to offer, we break the shackles of alienation, and we’re reminded that most strangers, like us, are people who deep down want to share a smile with a neighbour and connect about common interests, like good beer, good music, and good people.