Agincourt

Agincourt began as a small farming crossroads community in the mid-19th century, named, according to local tradition, by an early settler with a fondness for the 1415 Battle of Agincourt in France. It remained a modest rural hamlet for decades, developing its own small commercial strip along what became Sheppard Avenue as Scarborough around it slowly filled in with farms and country estates through the late 1800s and early 1900s.

A major Chinese-Canadian hub

Agincourt's character changed substantially from the 1970s onward, as it became one of the first Scarborough neighbourhoods to develop a large, established Chinese-Canadian community, drawing immigrants from Hong Kong and later mainland China who built a dense concentration of Chinese-owned shops, restaurants and plazas along Sheppard and Midland Avenues. That community presence made Agincourt, alongside neighbourhoods like Gerrard Street's South Asian corridor, one of the clearer examples of how Scarborough's postwar suburban development absorbed and was reshaped by successive waves of immigration.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Agincourt
• Wikipedia — Agincourt, Toronto

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