Maps supercharged: show your town in 3d!

Google Streetview has recently captured far more of the UK’s streets. London and the bigger cities have been on for a while, but Britain’s less well-known corners had to wait. If (most of) Stoke-on-Trent is covered now, it’s a fair bet that your street is covered too.

It is a great tool for communities to look at their place at a whole new level of detail. The images are always going to be a few months out of date, but you can still use it to highlight problem areas, show visitors what they should be looking out for and just enjoy a virtual journey through your streets or others.

As usual, be aware of your privacy on public mapping tools – think twice before adding personal details to maps.

To see Streetview, go to Google Maps and find the place you want to see using the search box. Find the little orange man and click and hold so it jumps out of the box. The streets you can view on Streetview should be highlighted with blue lines. You can then drag and ‘land’ your man to generate the Streetview image. Once in then use arrows to navigate along the roads and you can hold and drag any part of the image to move around a 3d image and look at buildings, floor and sky. This starts out a bit fiddly unless you’re used to the world of computer games, but you’ll soon get the hand of it, and always remember, you can’t break it.

If you’ve created your own map, Streetview can be used on it without you having to change anything.