Fort Langley is the reason British Columbia is a province at all. On November 19, 1858, James Douglas was sworn in as the first Governor of the newly created Colony of British Columbia on the grounds of Fort Langley — the Hudson's Bay Company trading post that had operated on the site since 1827. The original fort is now a National Historic Site managed by Parks Canada, and the village that grew up around it has been preserved as one of the most complete colonial-era village centres in Western Canada: two-storey wooden storefronts along Glover Road, a CN rail station (which still stops here for the weekend-only heritage train), a handful of churches from the 1880s–1900s, and genuinely walkable streets lined with antique stores, cafés, and independent restaurants.

As a neighbourhood, Fort Langley is the premier character area of the Township — single-family heritage houses on generous lots, strict heritage rules in the village core, and a walkability (everything in the village is within 5 minutes on foot) that's rare in Langley. It's also expensive relative to the rest of the Township; heritage houses in Fort Langley routinely list at a 30–40% premium over equivalent houses in Walnut Grove or Willoughby. Rental stock is rare — the neighbourhood is overwhelmingly owner-occupied — but heritage-house basement suites list occasionally at $1,700–2,200.

Tourism is real here, especially on weekends when day-trippers come for Fort Langley National Historic Site, the antique scene, the Fort Langley farmers' market in summer, and the waterfront walk along the Fraser River. For residents, the trade-off is accepting the weekend crowds in exchange for living in what is genuinely one of the most scenic and historically significant small-village settings in Metro Vancouver. Transit-wise Fort Langley is car-dependent; the 562 and C62 buses connect to Willowbrook and Surrey SkyTrain but service is infrequent.