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February 11th, 2007

Viewing Essex from a great height

roundabout

One of the great things about the internet is the maps. I have recently made the discovery that you can get superb birds eye pictures of certain parts of the UK via the Microsoft site local.live.com. You may need a special whathaveyou installed on your computer, I’m not sure, and you do really need broadband. You can see our house splendidly clearly from above from four different directions and zoom in to see a remarkable level of detail. I’m not going to post a link to the house, but the roundabout in Basildon above (which I thought was beautiful in its own way) is here.

The detail that is included for much of Essex is way better than on Google Maps / Google Earth. The areas that are included in such splendid detail on Microsoft Live are quite patchy though. I found, for eample, that places I know in South Wales and Berkshire and Surrey are not included. Nottingham, which I chose entirely at random, is.

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7 Responses to “Viewing Essex from a great height”


  1. MB says:

    Hey Dave, People who have liked that roundabout have also bought this book about roundabouts!

    February 11th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
  2. ferijen says:

    Cool, isn’t it. The south coast – Hampshire/Dorset areas anyway – come up very well.

    February 11th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
  3. Simo says:

    Excellent, I had a look for my house and found it, better than google for that as the coverage of our town on their site is very poor, here I could see that the photo was taken in late 2001 as my house is only half built!

    February 12th, 2007 at 10:56 am
  4. Chris Clark says:

    It is very good but it did reset my home page from Google to live.com, which is MS’s own search engine…what else are they doing in exchange for this free tool?

    Me cynical …never
    :-)

    February 12th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
  5. Dave K says:

    Instant research tool for theives. Still, pretty cool…now, if only we could get broadband out here in the sticks. [sigh]

    February 12th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
  6. David Keen says:

    Great site, though the photo for my home town in Somerset is about 10 years old, our estate is nothing more than rolling fields in the picture. I hope they catch the guy on the roundabout who’s straddling two lanes with his caravan. Road hog!

    February 12th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
  7. Mary says:

    I’m obviously one of the lucky ones – I saw my car on our drive, and we’ve only lived here 2 years!

    Well good!

    February 13th, 2007 at 7:52 pm