Colwood Just Grew a Second Downtown, and Half the City Hasn't Noticed

If you live near Wale Road, your year has been about a bridge. If you live near Royal Bay, your year has been about a burger chain. Ask either group what changed in Colwood in 2026 and you will get a completely different answer, because for the first time in this city's history, there are genuinely two places that function like a center of town, and they sit far enough apart that most residents are only tracking one of them.

That split is the actual story here, more than any single opening. Colwood didn't get one new commercial strip this year. It got two, on opposite ends of the municipality, growing for different reasons and serving different daily routines.

The old corridor gets a bridge and a brunch spot

Sooke Road at Wale Road used to be the kind of intersection you crossed carefully, on foot or on a bike, timing the gap in traffic. On April 9, 2026, the City of Colwood opened a new pedestrian and cycling overpass there, a 38-metre span that carries the Galloping Goose Trail over the highway instead of through it. The city's own eco-counter data put daily use of that stretch at around 1,000 pedestrians and cyclists even before the bridge opened, a number officials expect to climb now that the crossing no longer requires a gap in traffic to time. The $6.3 million project drew roughly $3.6 million in combined federal and provincial funding, and the city has a second phase already underway: a new multi-use pathway running the length of the Colwood waterfront from the Lagoon Bridge to the growing Beachlands neighbourhood.

Wale Road is also where Colwood's most talked-about food news landed this year. Ruby, the Victoria brunch spot known for scratch cooking and a loyal following, announced in January that it would open its third location, and its first on the West Shore, in the former Sawmill Taphouse & Grill space on Wale Road, a building longtime locals still call 328 Taphouse. Co-owner Chris Jones grew up in Colwood, and co-owner Josh Goyert described the move as strategic as much as personal, telling Victoria Buzz the brand had always had its eye on the West Shore. The target was an early spring opening, with construction timing kept deliberately loose at the time of the announcement. Spring has since come and gone, so if Ruby held anywhere close to that window, Wale Road already has its brunch spot.

Put those two things next to each other and you get a corridor that was built for people already living around it: a safer way to walk or bike the route they already use, and a brunch spot in a building they already recognized. Nothing here required inventing a new neighbourhood.

Royal Bay builds its own downtown from scratch

Across the city, the Royal Bay side of Colwood is doing the opposite. Instead of retrofitting an existing corridor, it's building a commercial center on land that had none.

Arbutus Landing, a 42,000-square-foot retail development at Metchosin Road and Ryder Hesjedal Way, broke ground in 2025 with Rexall as its confirmed anchor tenant. The original timeline had it opening by summer 2026. By the time construction was underway, On-Site Magazine reported the opening had shifted to fall 2026, the kind of quiet schedule slip that's easy to miss unless you're actually watching the site. The tenant list has filled in since groundbreaking: Teriyaki Express, Firehouse Subs, Bosley's, a Pilates studio, a nail salon, and, as of this spring, Five Guys, confirmed as the chain's first Vancouver Island location. Colwood Councillor Ian Ward called it the worst-kept secret in town once the site plan leaked, and the burger chain itself hadn't locked an opening date as of late March, though with Arbutus Landing now aiming for fall, the wait is close to over.

Across the street, the Royal BC Museum's 163,611-square-foot archives and collections facility, known as PARC, is rising alongside it. It's a different kind of neighbour than a pharmacy or a sandwich shop, but it's part of the same growth wave, and it says something about how much confidence the region has in this particular patch of Colwood holding onto its population.

That confidence has a number attached to it. At the Arbutus Landing groundbreaking in 2025, Mayor Doug Kobayashi noted that the area within a five-kilometre radius already held about 22,000 people, part of a growth curve the project's own developer, Astria Properties, has pegged at roughly 30 percent by 2038.

"As our community continues to grow, residents will need access to more shops, services, employment opportunities and gathering places. Arbutus Landing will help meet those needs."

That's a development company's framing of its own project, worth noting as such, but the underlying population trend lines up with everything else happening in Royal Bay this year: a retail hub, a museum facility, and a housing base that keeps expanding around both.

The food scene that predates the headlines

Not everything worth knowing about in Colwood showed up in a press release this year. Table Nineteen, tucked into the Olympic View Golf Club, has quietly built a reputation as one of the West Shore's better-kept secrets, according to the food newsletter Tasting Victoria, which called out its Tuesday date-night special alongside a menu built around shareable plates and a deep cocktail and wine list. It's open for lunch and dinner daily, sitting on a golf course view most people driving past on Sooke Road never think to look for.

Bilston Creek Farm runs on an entirely different rhythm. It's not a restaurant, but it hosts a wood-fired pizza pop-up helmed by Chef David Tozer, who has spent more than a decade honing Napoletana-style pies on the farm's custom outdoor oven. The pop-ups run on select weekends through the season, with pre-orders available through the farm's own site. It's the kind of thing you only know about if you're already looking, which is exactly the point.

The next two weeks on the Colwood calendar

Whichever side of the city you're on, the fall event calendar is stacking up fast. Here's what's on the books through the next two weekends, straight from the city's own events listing:

The Swap Shop and Market runs every Sunday at Rally at Royal Bay, the corner of Producers Way and Royal Commons, with $2 admission or a non-perishable food donation going to the Goldstream Food Bank. It's one of the few weekly fixtures that ties both halves of the city together, since it sits right in the newer Royal Bay footprint but draws sellers and browsers from across Colwood.

What this means for how you spend a Saturday now

Two years ago, "going out" in Colwood mostly meant driving to Langford or into Victoria. That's no longer automatic. If your daily loop runs through Wale Road, you now have a safer trail crossing and a brunch spot worth the wait. If it runs through Royal Bay, you have a retail hub filling in fast and a burger chain the whole region has been asking for. Neither corridor has caught up to the other yet, and there's no guarantee they ever fully will. What's changed is that Colwood residents now have to decide, more deliberately than before, which side of the city their week actually revolves around.

That's not a small shift for a city this size. It's worth watching which corridor keeps pulling harder as Arbutus Landing finishes filling out this fall and the waterfront pathway project moves forward on the other end of town.

If you're the kind of person who likes tracking what's actually happening in the neighbourhoods around Greater Victoria, not just the market numbers, Kash Burley keeps close tabs on exactly this kind of local change across the region. Reach out anytime you want the neighbourhood-level view, whether you're planning your weekend or planning something bigger down the road.