Explore Paris in Google Street View

Paris is unusually good in Street View because of a decision made in the 1850s. When Haussmann rebuilt the city he imposed a single height, a single stone and a single roofline across whole districts, so a boulevard here reads as one continuous facade rather than a row of separate buildings. On a screen that consistency is what makes the city instantly recognisable, and it is why you can drop into almost any arrondissement and know within a second where you are.

The reward is in the contrast. Cross from a Haussmann boulevard into the Marais and the street narrows, the stone gets older and dirtier, and the buildings stop lining up. Rue des Rosiers is barely wide enough for the car that photographed it. Two minutes of virtual walking takes you between two Parises that were built four hundred years apart, and the seam between them is visible in the pavement.

Start on the river. The Seine runs through the middle with a quay on each bank, and both are photographed almost continuously, so you can follow the water from the Eiffel Tower down past the Louvre to Notre-Dame without ever leaving the camera's path. The bridges are the best vantage points. Pont Alexandre III has gilded statues at each corner and a clear line down to the Invalides dome, and it is the single most photogenic stop in the city.

Montmartre is the one place where Street View struggles, and it is worth knowing why before you go looking. The hill is steep enough that several of the best lanes are staircases, and a car cannot drive a staircase. Rue Foyatier, the famous stepped street beside the funicular, exists in Street View only where the trekker walked it. Around Sacré-Coeur you will find yourself dropped onto the main roads and left to work around the edges of the hill.

For a specific detour with some history in it, find Boulevard du Temple. In 1838 Louis Daguerre pointed a camera at it from an upstairs window and produced what is generally accepted as the first photograph of a human being, a man having his boots polished who stood still long enough to register during a ten minute exposure. The street is still there, still busy, and now navigable in a medium that photographs everybody whether they stand still or not.

The other thing Paris does well virtually is the covered passage. The nineteenth-century arcades near Grands Boulevards, glass-roofed and lined with small shops, were photographed on foot rather than by car, so the imagery inside them has a different quality: lower, slower, closer to the shopfronts. Passage des Panoramas and Galerie Vivienne both survive this way and neither is easy to find from the street outside, which is exactly what makes finding them satisfying.