Peakes Quay sits at the heart of Charlottetown's waterfront, named after James Peake Jr., a shipbuilder so wealthy he is believed to have been one of the richest people ever to live on Prince Edward Island. He owned three wharves here; this was number three, built in 1872.

For most of its life, the quay was workaday and industrial, shipping potatoes, fish and wood to Britain and the United States, before a door factory and a woodworking company moved in. It wasn't until 1989 that the Charlottetown Area Development Corporation bought the property and turned it into the colourful marina and retail precinct you see today.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use Peakes Quay to trace the rise and fall of PEI's shipbuilding era, explaining how over 4,000 wooden ships were built on the island in eighty years, and how their sudden obsolescence, when steel and steam took over, sent the island's population plummeting from 120,000 to 80,000 in a single generation.