Vancouver Sun readers know Robin Ward from his tony weekly column that tracks local architecture. With titles such as “B.C.’s oldest dairy is tastefully preserved,” these short essays, accompanied by Ward’s etchy line drawings, are perfect for the culture of Saturday morning: substance and diversion for work-dumbed brains.

Echoes of Empire mixes history, and architecture, too, but Ward attempts more than a weekend quickie. In words (lots of them) and pictures, he catalogues over 60 architecturally significant locations in and around Victoria. He also has a go at re-viewing the fin de siècle. Specifically, he adds First Nations and Chinese citizens to accounts of the influx of settler Brits and Hudson’s Bay boys, attempting a more complexly peopled version of life in the City of Gardens. But in a section about the Songhees Indian Reserve and how its natives were kicked off and out-treatied, native land title seems strangely off-topic for a book on “Remarkable Buildings” (the Indian dwellings are not described). Ward returns to such matters often, however, betraying a white man’s ear for the sensational and topical: opium dens, bordellos, shipwrecks, interracial sex, and the commodification and export of native artifacts.

Ward’s history is the popular kind, an adept stitching of notable characters and events into a souped-up narrative. His dawdling descriptions of buildings and their defining characteristics, though, are jargon-heavy and specialized. While authoritative, the writing does not match the more familiar content of the bulk of the book. Such abrupt shifts in style and content make it difficult to determine, at times, just what Echoes of Empire is about.

There is little new in the revamped British Columbia Ward presents – even the steamy scurrilous bits are noted in other histories. A book more weighted in favour of Ward’s strengths as an architectural critic might create an intriguing depiction of a city whose reputation already borders on imperial dullness.