The stretch of Eastern Avenue through Leslieville has become one of Canada's most significant large-scale mural corridors. Massive, bold, narrative — this is street art as architecture.
Neighbourhood: Leslieville · Address: Eastern Ave, Toronto, ON · Hours: Open 24 hours · Price Range: Free · Editorial status: Not yet verified
Eastern Avenue in Leslieville lets you explore a gallery of massive murals right on the city streets, with new works popping up regularly thanks to ongoing artist commissions. These aren’t your average wall doodles—they’re genuinely ambitious pieces you can walk right up to.
Unlike downtown’s laneway art, these murals span walls of warehouses and industrial buildings, with pieces sometimes stretching more than 100 feet. Many feature collaborative work from Canadian and international artists, giving the area a sense of curated evolution rather than a static outdoor gallery.
If you want a version of Toronto that feels improvised, loud in all the right ways, and totally unbothered by polish, go walk Kensington Market for the murals. Seriously, don’t treat it like one wall or one photo stop. The whole neighbourhood is the canvas. You’ll turn down Kensington Avenue, cut over to Augusta, drift toward College, and realize the art isn’t organized for you in any neat little route. It spills across garage doors, alley walls, utility boxes, back fences, shop shutters, and the sides of old brick buildings that look like they’ve been painted over a hundred times. What makes the murals here so good is that they don’t feel commissioned to death. Some are huge and meticulous, all layered colour and surreal faces. Others are raw, funny, angry, tender, or obviously done fast in the middle of some burst of energy. You’ll see psychedelic animals, political slogans, cartoonish dreamscapes, portraits of community figures, anti-gentrification messages, and little weird details tucked into corners that are easy to miss if you’re rushing. A metal roll-down door might be a full underwater scene before noon, then halfway open by lunch with a produce stand operating under it. That’s kind of the point. The art isn’t separate from daily life here. Weekend morning is the best time to go. Early enough that the streets are still waking up, but not so early that nothing’s open and the place feels flat. You’ll get softer light for photos, fewer parked delivery trucks blocking walls, and enough activity to make the neighbourhood feel like itself. Expect cyclists weaving through, people carrying coffee, vendors setting up, someone playing music you didn’t see coming from a speaker balanced in a doorway. It’s not quiet, exactly, but it’s less chaotic than late afternoon. Walk slowly. Look down the alleys. Some of the best pieces aren’t on the main drag at all, and the side streets can have these layered walls where tags, wheatpaste posters, and full murals all compete for space. Don’t expect permanence. That’s the magic and also the reason to keep coming back. Something you loved last summer might be painted over now, replaced by something sharper, stranger, or more urgent. Kensington’s murals tend to reflect whatever the neighbourhood is feeling—joy, resistance, grief, satire, solidarity. You can actually sense that conversation happening on the walls. A practical note: wear shoes you don’t mind putting real distance on, because “just one block more” happens a lot here. Bring your camera, but don’t spend the whole time staring through it. The best part is the accumulation of it all—the smell of coffee and fresh bread, the cracked pavement, the shouting from a fruit stand, the sudden burst of colour on a fence where you least expected it. And if a shot means blocking a storefront or someone’s path, wait a second. Kensington works because people actually live and work in it. The murals are amazing, but the neighbourhood around them is what gives them charge.
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