If you roll your eyes and chuckle at calling the widened part of Stratford’s Avon River “Lake Victoria”, you’re on your way to being a local.

That’s it’s official name, and it’s the part tourists see, starting at a picturesque stone bridge near the Festival Theatre, its olive-green waters flowing on either side of Tom Patterson Island, and then to the R Thomas Orr dam a few city blocks east, whose presence creates the widened reservoir. To the east of this section is the narrow Avon River originating northeast of Stratford, and to the west is more narrow waterway, flowing southwest to empty into North Thames River.

While the Avon adds to the Stratford visitor experience, it’s also an integral part of local life. In winter, people cleared skating tracks and hockey rinks on the river, a practice now declared illegal by litigation-cautious city officials. My father-in-law recalls swimming in the river when he was young (not a recommended practice, any more). The reservoir portion is only 1.6 kilometres long, but people kayak and canoe there. Fishers drop their lines, mostly for bass and carp. A river walk is part of many residents’ daily routine; others get a morning takeaway coffee, drive to the river, park with their vehicle hood facing the water and shoreline willow trees, and sip away while they watch the dog walkers, strutting Canada Geese and, yes, the swans, meander by.

The first Mute Swans came to Stratford in 1918, a gift to the city from a local resident. The annual ritual to move those swans from their winter headquarters behind the Allman Arena to the river grew into a kinda crazy event for many years: A Swan Parade with pipe band, celebrity escorts, and an ever-growing crowd of observers, many wearing paper hats shaped like swans. This year, 2026, saw an end to the parade as the keepers of the swans decided the set-date parade was harming the birds for a couple reasons. One, the noise and crowds. Two, a set weekend date meant the swans got moved when conditions might not be optimum for them.

In this first parade-free year, without fanfare (but with photos and a news release shared by the city), 12 young swans toddled to the river on a weekday, April 8, and three mated pairs were settled in more-private spots to build their breeding nests.

Families gather along the river for picnics. There are a variety of free concert series, where people sit on the shore and hear music performed on the water: the pontoon Razzamajazz has operated for 35 years and presents four early evening concerts weekly through July and August.

Residents even turn to the river to memorialize their loved ones. The Avon /Lake Victoria is lined with benches with dedication plaques: the one pictured here is on the north shore, near a park playground area, and remembers my husband’s maternal grandparents.

It can be easy to take this picturesque, park-lined river for granted. As my father-in-law remarked on one walk we took together along the Avon, “when I grew up here, I thought every town looked like this.”

The great 2025 “dry up” was a wake-up call to Stratford of just how deeply the river defines this place.

As the local newspaper, the Beacon Herald, reported, the gate at the Orr Dam “opened automatically during a storm on the night of Thursday, July 24, to release water and prevent upstream flooding. Although it was open only briefly, debris was drawn underneath and is now preventing it from closing.”

That meant the river water, slowly and excruciatingly, drained away, leaving mud flats and a narrow trickle of water following the original river’s curves. The Thames Valley Upper Conservation Authority officials, who maintain the reservoir, could not reach the jammed gate sluice. When they finally could, and shut the sluice, Stratford was in a dry spell and no new rainwater refilled “Lake Victoria” from its source.

This event made national news. Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, ran an article titled “Stratford’s iconic Avon River has dried up, stunning locals and tourists.”

The Boathouse, a tourist-focused business that rents paddle boats, canoes, kayaks, and operates the only mechanized boat allowed on the river – the tour boat Juliet III – was most severely impacted financially as no river, no rentals. There were fears the big Dragon Boat Festival held annually in September would be scuppered, although a series of September rainy days finally refilled the river and that festival proceeded as usual.

The “big dry” has prompted collective soul-searching about the river, and its future.

The Provocations Ideas Festival has taken this as their theme for 2026. Under the banner Flowing Futures, there’s an Avon River Design Challenge, a writing and paddling event April 24 called “Writing the River”, and a Jane’s Walk set for May 2.

In late 2025, Destination Stratford created an ongoing Destination Stewardship Council “to help the visitor economy support community wellbeing in new, perhaps even profound ways.” The first event, held in January 2026 focused on “Finding Our Flow, Enlivening Our Future” and discussed:

• Exploring the river, deepening our understanding of its complexity.
• Engaging with a specific river-based project as a practice ground for cultivating community wellbeing.

One initiative that’s burbled up from this meeting would address a long-standing issue with river access. The river’s north shore, for the portion between James Street and Huron Street, had a public walking path that bordered the backyards of houses on ritzy William Street. Several years ago – during the decade I lived in Toronto – the homeowners on William Street between Waterloo and Huron streets argued that their properties went right to the river’s edge, and no-one but they should be on this land. Now, people walking “the loop”, as locals call a river walk that covers both north and south shores, walk on a path along people’s backyards from James Street to Water Street, but then must leave the river’s edge and walk on a city street in the Water-to-Huron section.

Zac Gribble, Executive Director at Destination Stratford, says they are in the “very early stages” of exploring an initiative that would add an in-the-river boardwalk along this homeowner-blocked section to give public access over the full loop, along with other measures to improve pedestrian access. “A preliminary feasibility study is now underway so that we can better understand and evaluate the size and scope of the initiative.”

Translation: This would be super expensive, and lord knows where we’d find the money for it.

Fewer locals this year take the river for granted than at the same time last year, pre “big dry”. Regardless of how any of the torrent of initiatives may flow, the river will remain Stratford’s defining feature. As the playwright and poet James Reaney wrote in To The Avon River Above Stratford, Canada:

The rain and the snow of my mind
Shall supply the spring of that river
Forever.