On the morning of June 18, 2026, the line for a bakery in Surrey stretched the length of an entire building. By 10:30 a.m., people who wanted a table at the new Breka Bakery & Café at King George Hub had already been waiting 45 minutes, the queue running down George Junction Way, the short street that runs behind King George SkyTrain station. One customer, a Guildford resident named Anna Kruger, told the Surrey Now-Leader she'd been a regular at Breka's Vancouver locations for years and finally didn't have to cross the Fraser to get there.
That line was not really about pastries. It was the sound of a fourteen-year construction project finally closing its last gap.
King George Hub broke ground in 2012 on a ten-acre site next to King George SkyTrain station, and for most of the time since, it has looked like exactly what it was: a series of cranes, hoarding, and half-finished towers that Surrey City Centre residents walked past on their way to the train. That era is now ending in real time. Breka's opening added a 24-hour bakery to a food lineup that already includes Big Way Hot Pot, Jollibee, Marble Slab Creamery, Presotea, Sushi Street, Pokerrito, and Donair Affair, bringing the development's food and drink count to nearly two dozen tenants. And in one week, on September 1, 2026, the fifth and final phase of the project, a 40-storey rental tower called Tether, reaches move-in readiness with 402 pet-friendly units.
Five Phases, Fourteen Years, One Slow Reveal
The pace of this project is easy to miss if you only clock it when something opens. Laid end to end, it looks like this:
- Phase A (2015): the Coast Capital Savings headquarters, a 190,000-square-foot office tower with ground-floor retail and a public plaza.
- Phase B (2021): Hub One and Hub Two, two residential towers totaling 738 suites that sold out in four weeks back in 2017, plus the Hub 9850 office building.
- Phase C (2021): The Line, a standalone residential tower.
- Phase D (2025): Plaza One and Plaza Two, 886 suites and 30,000 square feet of new commercial space, the section of the project that brought in Breka and Big Way.
- Phase E (2026): Tether, the final rental tower, ready for occupancy September 1.
What that timeline shows is a project that sold fast and built slow. Hub One and Two moved out in a month in 2017 but didn't hand over keys until 2021. Plaza One and Two were fully pre-sold back in 2021 and only opened in 2025. The retail that makes a project like this feel finished, the bakery, the hot pot spot, the everyday errands, arrived last, years after most of the people who'll actually use it had already moved in. If you've lived near King George Station and felt like the neighborhood was perpetually "almost done," the phase dates explain why that feeling was accurate rather than impatient.
Why the Bakery Line Matters More Than It Looks
A 24-hour bakery is a genuinely uncommon thing south of the Fraser River. Most of Metro Vancouver's round-the-clock cafés cluster in Vancouver proper, and Breka's King George Hub location is its first outside the city, its ninth overall since the family business started in Vancouver's Sunset neighbourhood back in 2006. That matters here specifically because King George Station sits within walking distance of both an SFU Surrey campus and KPU's Civic Plaza campus, which means the customer base isn't just condo residents heading home late. It's students studying past midnight, people getting off shift work, and anyone leaving Holland Park or Central City Shopping Centre after everything else on the block has closed.
Kruger put it plainly when she talked to the Now-Leader about the new location:
"I think this is going to be huge, somewhere to go for a dessert after you go see a movie, something like that. It's a nice spot."
That's the kind of gap that doesn't show up in a leasing brochure but changes what a Thursday night near the station actually looks like.
The Corner Isn't Finished. It's Just Changing Shape.
Here's the part that the "grand opening" coverage tends to skip. This year, the province confirmed that station construction is now underway at all eight new stops on the Surrey Langley SkyTrain extension, a $6 billion project that stretches the Expo Line 16 kilometres along Fraser Highway from King George Station to Langley City Centre. By April 2026, about a quarter of the elevated guideway was already in place, and by July the underground duct bank that will carry the line's electrical systems had passed 75 percent complete. Testing and commissioning are scheduled to begin in December 2026 and continue through 2029, with the line expected to enter service before the end of that year.
In practice, that means the immediate area around King George Hub is trading one kind of construction identity for another. The hoarding and cranes that defined the Hub's ten-acre footprint for over a decade are coming down just as new guideway columns start climbing along Fraser Highway heading east, toward Fleetwood, Clayton, and eventually Langley. If you live close enough to King George Station to have heard pile drivers for the Hub project, you're likely to hear a different set of construction sounds over the next few years, just aimed in a different direction and tied to a different finish line, one that's roughly three years out instead of fourteen.
There's a second, quieter shift happening alongside the residential build-out. PCI's own director of leasing told Real Estate News Exchange that office vacancy across King George Hub was running around 4.4 percent, well under downtown Vancouver's roughly 11.2 percent vacancy rate at the time she spoke. Combined with Coast Capital's headquarters and the Hub 9850 office tower, that's part of why the sidewalks around the station feel busier at lunch now than they did a few years ago. This isn't only becoming a place people sleep. It's becoming a place people work, which changes who's actually in line at Breka on a Tuesday afternoon versus a Saturday morning.
What This Actually Changes If You're Already Here
For residents who've watched this corner for years, the practical shift is straightforward. The retail podium that finally makes King George Hub feel like a finished neighborhood, rather than a residential tower with a grocery store attached, is open now. Tether's 402 units start filling in next week. The food options at street level went from sparse to nearly two dozen tenants in the space of about a year. That's the payoff for people who bought or leased here early and waited through the scaffolding.
What doesn't change, at least not yet, is the district's underlying identity as a place under active construction. The Surrey Langley SkyTrain project is still years from opening, and King George Station is its literal starting point. The difference this time is direction. The disruption is moving away from the Hub's footprint and out along the corridor toward Langley, which means the plaza in front of Breka is likely to stay usable and finished while the next round of construction happens somewhere further down Fraser Highway.
Fourteen years is a long time to watch one corner change. The King George Hub project page tells the phase-by-phase story in developer language, but the version that matters if you live nearby is simpler: the wait for a finished ground floor is over, and the wait for a finished transit line has just begun.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans near Surrey City Centre, whether that's timing a move, sizing up a listing, or just understanding how these changes ripple into value, The Agency White Rock keeps close tabs on how projects like this reshape the neighborhoods we work in every day. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
