![]() ![]() “Its primary focus,” says Google’s Paddy Flynn, “is to make the user experience in Google Maps more real.” Street View was initially conceived as a way to improve the accuracy of Google Maps and it is still used by Google as a way of keeping Maps up-to-date, for example by removing defunct business listings. When Street View was launched in May 2007, it was touted as an opportunity for users to “quickly and easily view and navigate high-resolution, 360-degree street-level images of various cities across the world”. She always used to dress so smartly… she died in 2018 after a massive stroke.” Another added: “I found my little nan walking to the shops. “My dad died three years ago, but on Google maps he is still doing some gardening, which he loved,” one user responded. The post was liked more than 200,000 times, with users sharing their own experience of imaginative time-travel, courtesy of Street View. “It is her house, she is still alive, I am still visiting every few months on the train to Bodmin Parkway.” “There is a light on in her bedroom,” Turner wrote. In June, the poet Sherri Turner went viral after posting a Twitter thread about her experience revisiting her mother’s old house on Street View. I am not the only person to connect with Google Street View on an emotional level. I found my little nan walking to the shops. I spent so many afternoons waiting for my mother in this spot that it feels as if there is an imprint of me forever leaning there, a ghostlike presence for today’s students to bustle past. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View. Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed. I am irritated and worried I won’t have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. ![]() I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge. I am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up.
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