Explore Los Angeles in Google Street View

Los Angeles is the city Street View was made for, and that is not a compliment to either. It was built around driving, the distances between anything interesting are large, and the experience of the place is genuinely the experience of moving through it at speed. A camera on a car roof captures Los Angeles more faithfully than it captures anywhere in Europe, because the car roof is where residents see it from too.

Start with Mulholland Drive. It runs along the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains and separates the basin from the San Fernando Valley, and the road is photographed for most of its length. Look south and the city runs to the ocean; turn round and the Valley grid stretches to the next range. Very few roads anywhere give you two different cities from the same tarmac.

The Hollywood Sign is a good lesson in expectation. You cannot get close to it by road, and Street View reflects that honestly. What you get is the view from Beachwood Drive and the residential streets below, with the letters small on the hillside above. That is what visitors actually see, and the imagery is more accurate than most photographs of it.

Venice and Santa Monica are the pedestrian exceptions and both were captured on foot. The Venice boardwalk, with its skate park and muscle beach and stalls, is a continuous walk of about two miles. Santa Monica Pier sits at the western end of Route 66, and the sign marking the end of the road is there in the imagery, which makes it a satisfying finish if you have been following the route.

Downtown is the part people expect least. It has the highest concentration of pre-war buildings in the region, several of them film locations you will recognise without being able to place, and it is dense and walkable in a way the rest of the region is not. The Bradbury Building's interior is the famous one, though from the street it is deliberately plain.

For a genuine sense of scale, follow a single boulevard. Sunset runs twenty two miles from downtown to the Pacific, and it passes through about eight distinct cities on the way: Echo Park, Silver Lake, Hollywood, the Strip, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades. Following it in one continuous direction is the fastest way to understand that Los Angeles is a county pretending to be a city.