The Galerie Vivienne was born from a landlord's logic.

In the 1820s, the owner of a property on rue des Petits-Champs realised he could punch a covered street through his building and rent shops along both sides. The idea caught on, and Paris eventually had around forty such arcades. 17 survive today.

This one is among the finest. Plate glass, a French invention, lines the shopfronts. Mirrors, whose manufacturing secret France famously stole from Venice by poaching Venetian glassmakers, reflect the light from the glass roof above.

In the 19th century, when streets outside were filthy with horse traffic and gaslight barely reached the pavement, the arcade offered something genuinely novel: a pleasant place to look at things without buying them. The French still call window shopping lécher les vitrines, licking the windows.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the Galerie Vivienne to trace how Paris's arcades invented the culture of browsing, connecting it to the plate glass, pilfered mirror technology, and changing shopping habits that shaped the modern city.