Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert

Off a busy old-town street, you step through an arch into a long, elegant arcade: a glass-roofed gallery of shops and cafes, light pouring down through the curved roof onto polished floors and ornate facades. This is the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, one of the oldest and most beautiful covered shopping arcades in Europe.

The arcade was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, in 1847, as a grand covered street of shops, an early and influential example of the elegant glazed galleries that became fashionable across Europe in that age. It set a template many others followed.

The design is a long, straight gallery under a barrel-vaulted glass roof, lined on both sides by tall, uniform facades with shops below and apartments above, the whole flooded with daylight, an indoor street made for strolling in any weather.

From the start it was a smart address, and it remains so, lined with chocolatiers, booksellers, cafes, a theatre, and shops, a place to browse fine goods and watch the well-dressed city pass under the glass.

The chocolate shops are a particular draw, some of the city's oldest and finest among them, so the arcade is a fine place to taste the Belgian chocolate the country is famous for, in elegant surroundings.

The architecture rewards looking up, at the curved glass roof, the rhythm of the facades, and the carved detail, a calm, grand space that feels a world away from the busy streets just outside.

The arcade is in fact divided into named sections along its length, but it reads as one long, light-filled gallery, and walking its full length, from one street to another, is the way to enjoy it.

It sits in the heart of the old town, a short step from the Grand Place, and connects to a lane famous for its restaurants, so it folds naturally into a wander through the historic centre.

It is at its best in the soft light of a bright day, when the glass roof fills the gallery with light, or in the evening when the shopfronts and cafes glow, and it is a welcome refuge in rain.

More than just shops, the arcade is an experience of nineteenth-century elegance preserved and still working, a piece of the grand, optimistic city of that age that you can still walk through and shop in.

A few practical notes. The arcade is free to walk through and covered, so it works in any weather; come to browse the chocolate and the shops, pause at a cafe, and walk its full length between the streets it joins.

Stroll the length of the bright gallery under its glass roof, pausing for a chocolate or a coffee among the elegant facades, and the grace of the nineteenth-century city surrounds you. When you step back out onto the street, the ordinary city resumes beyond the arch.