The land beneath the arcade carries one of colonial Brisbane's strangest stories. Patrick Mayne, a butcher who arrived with little, bought these two adjoining allotments in 1853 and 1854 and built a fortune that shadowed his family for generations. His son, Dr James Mayne, and daughter, Mary Emelia Mayne, never married and lived quietly with their inheritance and its rumours. When they commissioned this arcade in the early 1920s, they were already planning to give everything away. After James died in 1939 and Mary in 1940, the arcade passed to a board of trustees, with its proceeds directed to the University of Queensland's medical school. The faculty still bears the family name today. An arcade built for commerce became, in effect, an endowment, and shoppers have been underwriting medical research ever since without knowing it.

Richard Gailey Jr designed the arcade as a piece of theatre for shoppers. Both ends present near-matching faces to the street: three storeys of face brick with cement dressings, restrained Classical detail, and the words BRISBANE ARCADE raised in stone across the parapet. Step inside and the building opens up. A long central void runs the full length, crossed by a single walkway, with galleries of shops on either side and stairs at each end that still wear their original terrazzo. Above it all, lightweight steel trusses carry a glazed roof, and the clerestory windows wash the whole interior in soft natural light. It was built in the same confident decade as the Regent Theatre and Tattersalls Club, when Queen Street imagined itself a grand metropolitan boulevard.

The arcade has hidden chapters. In February 1952, a young art dealer named Brian Johnstone opened a gallery in a former air-raid shelter beneath the building. For nearly six years, that converted basement was one of Brisbane's liveliest spaces for contemporary art before it moved on in 1957. Decades later, the arcade absorbed another piece of the city's history when it took in Mirage, a sculpture by the Swiss-Israeli artist Gidon Graetz left over from World Expo 88, the event that announced Brisbane to the world. Layer by layer, the arcade has kept collecting fragments of the city around it, tucking a wartime shelter, a world's-fair sculpture and a hundred years of small businesses into one narrow corridor.

What sets the Brisbane Arcade apart is simply that it survived. The grand 1920s shopping arcade was once a common urban form, then it nearly vanished, swept aside by department stores and air-conditioned malls. This one was added to the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992 and reached its centenary in 2024, still doing the job it was built for. Today its shopfronts hold artisan jewellers, fashion designers and specialist makers rather than chains, and the upper gallery looks much as it did when the first shoppers climbed those terrazzo stairs. The arcade still marks its milestones in bloom, mounting a Spring Flower Show for its 95th anniversary in 2019 and filling the passage with colour again for its centenary. To walk through is to move through a surviving piece of interwar Brisbane, kept alive not as a museum but as a working street under glass, where the business of buying and selling has never actually stopped.