Memory lanes: Googles map of our lives – The Guardian

I am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She is late, as usual. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge. I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. I am irritated and worried I wont have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed.

Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. 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 todays students to bustle past.

I am not the only person to connect with Google Street View on an emotional level. In June, the poet Sherri Turner went viral after posting a Twitter thread about her experience revisiting her mothers old house on Street View. There is a light on in her bedroom, Turner wrote. It is her house, she is still alive, I am still visiting every few months on the train to Bodmin Parkway.

The post was liked more than 200,000 times, with users sharing their own experience of imaginative time-travel, courtesy of Street View. My dad died three years ago, but on Google maps he is still doing some gardening, which he loved, one user responded. Another added: I found my little nan walking to the shops. She always used to dress so smartly she died in 2018 after a massive stroke.

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. 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. Its primary focus, says Googles Paddy Flynn, is to make the user experience in Google Maps more real.

Fourteen years later, Street View has been extended to 87 countries across the world, including Swaziland, American Samoa and even Antarctica. It has captured more than 10m miles of imagery and taken on a significance to many users that goes beyond its utility as a navigational tool. During Covid, searches spiked 10-fold, as users roamed the world in search of open spaces beyond the confines of home, supermarket and park. It was a way for people to feel more connected to the real world, Flynn says, see places and take virtual tours.

Street View rewards the most intrepid explorers with obscure flourishes. Above Hawaii, Pegman transforms into a mermaid; on the banks of Loch Ness, he becomes the fictional monster. Users can even journey to the International Space Station and observe themselves through a pane of thickly reinforced glass, 400km from Earth.

On Street View, we have a panoptical view of the world and all the mysteries, non-sequiturs and idiocies that are part of everyday life. Here is Sherlock Holmes hailing a cab in Cambridge; a car submerged in a Michigan lake containing the body of a long-missing person; Mary Poppins waiting on the sidewalk at an amusement park; a caravan being stolen by a thief.

I couldnt believe it, says David Soanes, a 56-year-old teacher from Linton, Derbyshire, and the owner of said caravan, which was stolen in June 2009. His son discovered the suspect on Street View and police were able to identify the man involved, although sadly this wasnt sufficient evidence for a conviction. I go back and look at it from time to time, says Soanes, of the image of his former caravan mid-transfer to a new owner.

Maps have always been a vessel to try to contain the daunting abundance of the world by putting a cartographical stopper in it. Maps have been around since time immemorial, says Flynn, and technology enables digital representation. It is one thing to digitise maps and make them widely available and accessible. But that reflection of the real world is something that people are also looking for.

Rather than offering a facsimile of the world we live in, Street View offers something more profound: the opportunity to spot loved ones on familiar streets, unaware that their errand or commute would be captured for posterity by the all-seeing eye of a camera-mounted Street View car.

You take photos, says Adam Bell, 33, an oil worker from St Ives, Cambridgeshire, but this is something that is there by chance. You see someone whos no longer there, and its like a snapshot of that time.

Hes referring to his grandmother Maisie, who died in 2013, but forever sits in the window of her Belfast house, looking out at a passing Street View camera. Her favourite seat was next to the window, he says. She was always looking out into the street and commenting on who was going by. The Street View car was a strange thing and thats why she was taking a good look.

Street View reveals us for who we really are, rather than the versions we present to the world. The criminal mid-theft; the inquisitive grandmother at the window. Because most of the people captured are unaware they are being photographed, the images evoke a sense of intimacy and verisimilitude. The artist Jon Rafman, writing in Art City, describes Street View as an impersonal, abstract eye that is neither sparing nor sentimental. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, Rafman writes, and the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording.

When we see ourselves on Street View, we are reminded that we are peripheral players in a much greater narrative; passersby in another persons story, rather than the centre of the photographic frame. When we catch a glimpse of our loved ones on Street View, we see their hidden, solitary life. For the artist and lecturer Lisa Selby, 44, from Nottingham, Street View was a way for her to reconnect with a mother she scarcely knew growing up.

My mother was not maternal, says Selby, matter-of-factly. She didnt want to have a child. I am not saying that in a sad sense. I get it. She wasnt ready. Selbys mother, Helen, died in 2016, aged 61. She was an alcoholic and Selby was mostly raised by her grandparents, although she did spend time with her mother in her teens. She had this world of partying and drugs and alcohol, Selby says. I used to be bitter about it until I educated myself about it being an illness.

Selby always felt her mothers absence in her life. On Street View, she says, I would go and look at her house in Greenwich and see how it had changed. But I couldnt walk past there in real life, because it felt too traumatic. Selby would often look for her mother around Greenwich on Street View. I searched the streets for her, she says, as if I was walking around in real life.

And then one evening, someone messaged Selby, to tell her that Helen was on Street View, on the steps of Greenwich library. I was so excited when I found her, she says, My heart was racing fast. I was zooming in as much as I could. My face was close to the screen. It was like seeing a ghost. Shed once bumped into Helen there. It was one of her favourite spots. Helen didnt recognise her and asked her for any spare change. I said, Helen, its Lisa, your daughter, says Selby. Seeing Helen on the steps of the library, Selby felt as if shed been preserved in time. Like, digitally pickled or something.

Selby has no pictures of her mother from this time. Instead of taking a picture of her and putting it in a frame and hanging it on my wall, she says, its like a time machine that I can revisit when I want to see her again. She has not revisited the image of her mother since that night. But its nice knowing its there, Selby says. If I want to, I can place myself in front of her and look out at the things she was looking at at that moment. The busy street. The buses. The shops across the road. And then I can stand in front of those shops and look back at her.

Street View traps the dead and the living alike between pages of cartography, like dried flowers. The dead may not be visible to us in the living world any more, but on Street View, they achieve permanence. They keep updating the images for her street every few years, Bell says, but you go back to that year, and shes still there. Sometimes I think about it and have a little look. I turn back the clock on the dial and shes there again.

But Street View does more than just capture our loved ones in candid moments. Because you can turn back the clock on earlier versions, Street View allows us to move through digital space in a non-temporal, non-linear way and connect with the past on an emotional level. A sense of place is so important in memory, says the photographer Nancy Forde, from Waterloo, Ontario. Her Addressing Loss project asks users to submit stories and images of loved ones they miss, and the comfort theyve found remembering them via Street View images from when they were alive.

We tend to remember addresses or places that were meaningful, and how things looked like when we were kids. And thats whats so special about Street View, Forde goes on. Even if a home is renovated or changes, we can recognise something familiar in it. If something meaningful happened to us in that spot, it implants in our hippocampus. The interface of Street View, Forde says, mirrors the ways in which humans remember. You can zoom in and out, Forde says, and theres this telescoping. Its a little blurry at first, and then it rights itself. And I find that very evocative of how our memory works. We can try to remember something, and it sharpens as were talking about it or encountering it.

To all those who use it, Street View evokes a sense of freedom, in a rules-based, time-bound world. You can see bricks and mortar that arent there any more, says Selby. Shops you remember that arent there any more. I just wish it went all the way back to when I was born. But then Id spend all my time on Street View, not in the real world. Its almost like a game but based on reality. A driving game. Youre in the seat and you can go wherever you want to, to whatever year you want to.

I return to my school and click back through history, to see what the page looked like in 2008. There is sunlight glinting off a silver car, the same colour, manufacturer, and model as my mothers. The image is too blurry to see who is behind the wheel. Although it is probably not her, I like to think it is. I am waiting, and then she is here.

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Memory lanes: Googles map of our lives - The Guardian