Downtown Khedivial Cairo

Khedive Ismail rebuilt the ground between the medieval city and the Nile in the 1860s ahead of the opening of the Suez Canal, hiring European planners to lay out star-shaped squares and straight boulevards on the Haussmann model and inviting Italian, French and Greek architects to fill them. What went up over the next sixty years was an extraordinary run of apartment blocks and offices in Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, with caryatids, iron balconies, stained glass stairwells and grand entrance halls. Much of it is now shabby, subdivided and blackened by traffic, which is exactly what makes walking it interesting: the detail survives at first and second floor level above the shopfronts. Groppi's cafe, the Cosmopolitan and Sherif Street repay looking up, and a slow conservation effort has begun to clean some facades.

What you actually see

• Belle Epoque apartment blocks - caryatids and ironwork above the shopfronts.
• The star-shaped squares - Talaat Harb and Mustafa Kamel on the Paris model.
• Historic cafes - Groppi and its contemporaries, faded but open.
• Stained glass stairwells - visible through open entrance halls.

When to go

October to April, and walk it in the morning or after dark when the traffic thins and the facade lighting comes on. Fridays are the quietest daytime. Half a day of wandering, with cafe stops built in.

Honest expectations

Most buildings are private and you see them from the street; entrance halls depend on a doorman's goodwill. The area is loud, polluted and hard to cross on foot. Many celebrated cafes now trade on their name rather than their coffee. Restoration is patchy and some of the best facades are behind scaffolding or advertising.

Nearby

The Egyptian Museum is at the western end; Ataba and the medieval city lie east.