Explore Berlin in Google Street View

Berlin has a line running through it and you can follow it. A double row of cobblestones marks where the Wall stood, set into roads and pavements across the centre, and it is visible in Street View wherever the camera crossed it. Following that line is the most instructive thing you can do here, because it goes through places where the division is now invisible and others where it obviously still governs what was built.

The two halves developed differently and the buildings say so. East Berlin has wide boulevards and monumental blocks: Karl-Marx-Allee is two kilometres of 1950s socialist classicism, built at a scale nothing in the west matches. Cross to Kreuzberg or Charlottenburg and the streets narrow, the blocks become nineteenth-century tenements with courtyards behind them, and the whole rhythm changes.

The Brandenburg Gate is the obvious stop and its position is the point. It stood in the death strip, inaccessible from either side, for twenty eight years. Standing in front of it now, with Pariser Platz rebuilt around it and Unter den Linden running east, the ordinariness is the remarkable part.

For the parts of Berlin that are actually lived in, look at the courtyards. The Mietskaserne tenement blocks were built with a street facade and then two, three or four courtyards receding behind, each one a little poorer than the last. Hackesche Höfe near Hackescher Markt is the restored, decorated version and was captured on foot; plenty of ordinary blocks around Prenzlauer Berg show the plain version.

Tempelhof is the strangest place in the imagery. It was an airport in the middle of the city, closed in 2008, and the entire airfield became a public park with the runways left in place. People cycle down them. The terminal building, one of the largest structures in Europe when it was built, still stands at one edge. Nothing else in any city looks like this from ground level.

One detail worth hunting for. The Stolpersteine, small brass plates set into pavements outside the last homes of people deported by the Nazis, appear throughout the city. They are ten centimetres square and the imagery resolution catches them in places. There are tens of thousands across Berlin and finding one while wandering is an unexpectedly direct connection to what happened here.