Google Maps has today updated its aerial imagery for central London. The new imagery appears to be from sometime late last summer, and reveals the many new buildings and features that have appeared in the capital recently.
Above is the Olympic Stadium (with the triangular lighting gantries casting shadows into the bowl) and the partially complete Aquatic Centre. The high-capacity bridges linking to the stadium are in place. Below shows the coach park for the Olympics intruding into East Marsh, part of the famous Hackney Marshes. I’ve also included some pictures of the curvy new Walbrook building, on Cannon Street, which is squeezed around a tiny churchyard, and the new Shoredich High Street Station, with surrounding brownfield land.
2 replies on “New Aerial Photos of Central London in Google Maps”
Martin – yes, but it’s often wrong! Major updates seem to be tagged with a single day, whereas they are the result of many days’ flying.
If you go through the historic imagery, you’ll also see some problems with the dates there – for instance some of the 1999 imagery is clearly newer than the 2002/3 imagery, for London at least, as new buildings appear in the wrong order.
Google Earth takes the fun out of guessing the date the imagery was taken (it says it in the bottom-left corner of the wind0w) – so no need to [url=http://2lmc.org/spool/id/5474/]calculate it from Big Ben’s shadow[/url].
But I’ll not spoil it for you in case you want to work it out for yourself 🙂