Nathaniel Miller made his money in a Preston dental practice when dentistry was a barely regulated trade and the city centre was thick with cotton-trade money. He wanted something more permanent than tooth extractions, so in 1895 he held a competition for an indoor shopping centre modelled on London's Burlington Arcade. The winning architect, Edwin Bush of the Birmingham firm Essen, Nichol and Goodman, produced a smaller Lancashire cousin of the Mayfair original, with the same idea of refined undercover retail for a clientele who would rather not get rained on. When it opened in 1899, it was the first indoor shopping centre Preston had ever seen, and Miller had transformed himself from a man who fixed teeth into a man who built arcades.

The original building wore four pepper-pot turrets at its corners, the kind of decorative flourish that announced ambition to anyone glancing up. Safety concerns took them off in the 1920s, leaving the silhouette flatter but the interior unchanged. The upper floors were a hotel in the building's first decades. Somewhere within was a room called the Geisha Ballroom, a piece of Edwardian Japonisme that fit with the period's appetite for the exotic and has left almost no trace beyond its name. The hotel kept going under successive proprietors until 1947, when the residential life of the building finally ended. What remained downstairs was the arcade itself, ornate tiling, vintage shop fronts, glass-panelled ceiling, and a row of benches in the middle for anyone who wanted to sit and watch the city go by.

Miller Arcade is now Grade II listed, a designation that recognises the rarity of intact Victorian arcades anywhere in the north of England. The current tenants are a mix you would not have predicted in 1899: a Subway sandwich franchise sits among independent eateries and bars like Baluga, Smashed, IceBurg, and Haute Dolci, with the outdoor clothing chain Rohan tucked in alongside. The building is owned by Callaway Estate Limited, and the Lancashire Evening Post has published periodic appeals to safeguard its future. It has survived 125 years of changing retail fashions, two world wars, and the rise of the out-of-town shopping centre — which feels like the sort of thing a Preston dentist with ambitions would have been quietly proud of.

The arcade sits on the south side of Preston's Market Square, a few steps from the Harris Museum and a couple of minutes' walk from the Minster. It is one corner of a compact city centre where Victorian wealth from cotton and engineering left behind buildings far grander than a town of Preston's size would otherwise have produced. Walk in off the square, look up at the glass, and the rest of the modern high street disappears for a moment.