In addition to celebrating this bridge and its grand design, Lions Gate sets out to reveal these stories for the first time: the colonial ambitions of the British Empire stretched to its westernmost margin; the unresolved violation of nationhood the building of the bridge on native land entailed; the backroom political power the railroad barons continued to hold in the Canadian government long after their railroad was completed; the origins of the newly private, global empire building of the ‘new’ British peerage; and the strange phenomenon and circumstance of such a huge commercial enterprise being mounted in the midst of the “dirty thirties.”
Most mysterious of all is the figure of the man who both conceived and built this grand design. AJT Taylor is a character straight out of Ayn Rand: ambitious, shrewd, visionary, fearless, competitive, a man given to great economic and political risk, he appears to triumph in the embrace of the British nobility, high society, and financiers he has courted, and who appear to make the completion of his project both physically and politically possible. Yet at the opening ceremonies, he is not represented among the dignitaries, but watches from the sidelines with the ordinary citizens, having earlier surreptitiously sealed his story in one of Charles Marega’s lions who guard the south approach to this bridge of mystery. An exquisite cloth-bound book, rich in design, text and pictures, Lions Gate is a celebration not to be missed by Vancouverites and visitors alike.
