The Museum of Warsaw occupies an entire row of townhouses on the Old Town Market Square, eleven buildings that were reduced to rubble in 1944 and rebuilt from scratch in the decades that followed.

The fourth house from the left survived better than the rest, thanks to reinforced concrete ceilings installed in the 1930s. It is known as the negro house, after a carved bust of an ethnic African mounted beside the front door by a merchant in the 1600s, advertising his exotic trading connections.

The museum traces the city's history through maps, models, images and artefacts, and holds the original 1855 mermaid statue from Market Square, replaced outside by a replica after decades of war damage and vandalism.

VoiceMap's Old Town tour uses the building's facade to unpack the square's layered stories, from the Communist-era battle over religious statuary on the roofline to the meticulous work of postwar reconstruction.