Erin Mills sits in the western part of Mississauga, roughly bounded by the Credit River, Eglinton Avenue West, and the Mississauga Road corridor. Unlike the lakeside villages that grew up gradually over a century, Erin Mills exists because a single company decided, in one year, to build an entire town from farmland.
In 1969, Don Mills Development Corporation, a company tied to Canadian businessman E.P. Taylor, announced plans to build a “New Town” on roughly 7,000 acres of hilly land that had previously been farmland and horse country. The developers named it Erin Mills, borrowing “Erin” from the historic Erindale area nearby and referencing the grain mills that had once operated along the Credit River on that same land.
The community was built out in phases rather than all at once. Erin Mills South went up through the 1970s, Erin Mills West followed in the mid-1980s, and Erin Mills Central was substantially complete by 1989. Churchill Meadows, built between 2000 and 2010, extended the same development further south and is sometimes considered a later phase of the same broader project.
Two institutions anchor the neighbourhood and predate much of the residential build-out. The University of Toronto purchased land along the Credit River in the early 1960s, including an 1885 stone house called Lislehurst in what was then the village of Springfield-on-the-Credit, and opened Erindale College there in September 1967 with a single academic building and 155 students. It’s grown since into the University of Toronto Mississauga, now the university’s second-largest division with roughly 14,000 students, sitting just west of Erin Mills proper in the neighbouring Erindale area. Credit Valley Hospital, at Eglinton Avenue West and Erin Mills Parkway, opened on November 5, 1985, giving the growing community a full-service hospital of its own; it’s now part of Trillium Health Partners.
Erin Mills Town Centre, the development’s planned commercial hub, opened in 1989 at that same Eglinton and Erin Mills Parkway intersection. At more than 185 stores, it’s the second-largest shopping centre in Mississauga after Square One.
Erin Mills doesn’t have a GO station of its own. The closest option is Erindale GO Station, just west along Rathburn Road near the Credit River, on GO Transit’s Milton line, which like the Milton line service through Streetsville generally runs on a weekday, rush-hour-focused schedule rather than all-day service. MiWay buses run along Erin Mills Parkway, Eglinton Avenue, and Dundas Street, connecting into the Mississauga Transitway. See our transit guide for the fuller picture.