It’s hard to get away from Toronto’s colonial British history with so many streets and statues named after places in the mother country.

Our still-reluctant parting with the Queen was done through gradual and friendly legislation, rather than war, so no efforts were made to eradicate Toronto of its Britishness. We even accepted a King Edward VII statue from Delhi when India was doing its post-colonial purge. Located in the middle of Queen’s Park since 1969, Edward and his horse are even getting a renovation right now.

Less formal cross-Atlantic connections are the proliferation of pubs throughout the Toronto area. Different from bars, there’s an emphasis on food that follows in the “Public House” tradition, though Ontario’s Prohibition-era liquor laws require food be sold with alcohol.

Sometimes the pubs are Irish-inspired, and though Ireland was no colonial superpower, it spawned outposts across the city similar to the Tara Inn, a pub found in a Scarborough strip mall along Eglinton Ave. E.

“Come share a taste of Ireland,” the sign says. It’s just one stop on a tour of nations in this multicultural plaza and as it’s open late, the Tara keeps the strip lively after other shops have closed.

Downtown on Elm St., The Queen and Beaver, with a name that pokes a bit of fun at Canada’s Anglophilia, is a high styled pub with a Union Jack and pictures of the first Queen Elizabeth.

Just up Yonge St. on Isabella St., the Artful Dodger appropriately inhabits an entire Victorian duplex and has working gas fireplaces. Further north, the Rebel House by Rosedale subway forgoes Britain by recalling local history with its Rebellions of 1837 references.

The most comfortable pubs aren’t dives, but worn in like the leather seats in an old sports car or an aged club chair. There’s no fuss to enter or leave. Good pubs are a kind of public living room, what urban theorists call a “third space,” not home or work but a place where public life happens. You can go alone, to read or work on a laptop, but also to talk to other people.

There’s a looseness inside pubs that cracks Toronto’s legendary reserve. Everybody doesn’t need to necessarily know your name in a pub, but it’s the low-key friendliness that makes these essential parts of our city, with bartenders serving as amateur therapists of sorts, sucking up stories the way pub carpet absorbs spilled beer.

Pubs tend never to be the “it” places, rather they’re institutions that rarely change with the times. Out of fashion, they’re sometimes derided for being “fake,” imitation British or Irish pubs, but aren’t most places we go to a reference to somewhere or something else? Is a knock-off painting of a fox hunt any different than a café that uses reclaimed wood and exposed brick walls that allude to an rougher, industrial past that few of us actually experience?

I’ve a soft spot for local chain pubs like the Firkins. With names like the Churchmouse and Firkin, the Flatiron and Firkin, and the Squire and Firkin, there should be one called the Firkin and Various and Sundry. They are the Starbucks of pubs, each familiar but different. Satellite radio will play the hit songs; CP24 will be in silent rotation on plasma screens, and a broad cross section of people will be inside. There’s no worry if the scene isn’t my scene because they’re as every-scene as late-evening Toronto gets.

Our pubs are a public living room whenever we need them.

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Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter@shawnmicallef

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