Downtown Cairo

On the night of January 26, 1952, roughly 750 buildings around you went up in flames and nearly thirty people died, in a fire whose cause is still disputed. The guide traces the neighborhood back to Khedive Ismail's Paris-on-the-Nile ambitions, when he hired French and Italian architects to lay out grand boulevards where medieval alleys once stood, and follows the elegant decades that followed on Suleiman Pasha Street. It walks through the British attack in Ismailia the day before the fire, and the crowd's rage that turned on Shepheard's Hotel that night.