Guelph trip planner

Guelph is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly 28km east of Waterloo and 100km west of downtown Toronto at the intersection of Highway 6 and Highway 7. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. Because of its low crime rates, clean environment and generally high standard of living, Guelph is consistently rated as one of Canada's best places to live. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country throughout the 2008–2012 global recession, and has ranked at the bottom of Canada's crime severity list since 2007.HistoryBefore colonization, the area was considered by the surrounding indigenous communities to be a "neutral" zone. On selected dates, members from these communities would meet and trade goods by the Speed River.Guelph was selected as the headquarters of British development firm "the Canada Company" by its first superintendent John Galt, a popular Scottish novelist who designed the town to attract settlers and the surrounding countryside. Galt designed the town to resemble a European city centre, complete with squares, broad main streets and narrow side streets, resulting in a variety of block sizes and shapes which are still in place today. The street plan was laid out in a radial street and grid system that branches out from the down-town, a technique which was also employed in other planned towns of this era, such as Buffalo, New York.)