Shakespeare's Globe rises from the Thames riverbank like a time traveller's dream, its thatched roof the only one permitted in London since the Great Fire of 1666. The theatre exists thanks to an American actor who arrived in 1949 searching for traces of the original and found only a forgotten plaque on a brewery wall.

Sam Wannamaker spent the rest of his life championing this reconstruction, built from unseasoned oak, lime plaster and thatch, just as the original had been. The differences are subtle but telling: water sprinklers peek through the thatch roof, and unlike Elizabethan audiences who stood on sawdust and relieved themselves where they stood, modern theatregoers have access to toilets. The theatre opened in 1997, four years after Wannamaker's death, fulfilling his forty-eight-year mission.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours reveal how Shakespeare's company dismantled their Shoreditch theatre in the winter of 1598 and carried its timbers across the frozen Thames to build the Globe. They trace the theatre's destruction when a cannon fired set the thatch ablaze in 1613. The tours also explain why whistling backstage remains bad luck to this day.