Explore Prague in Google Street View

Prague's centre survived the Second World War largely undamaged, which makes it one of very few large European cities where the medieval street plan is not a reconstruction. What you are looking at is genuinely old, not rebuilt to look old, and the difference shows in the irregularity: the streets bend for reasons that made sense to somebody in the fourteenth century and have been preserved by accident ever since.

Charles Bridge is the centre of everything and it is pedestrian, so it was captured on foot. Thirty baroque statues line it, added three centuries after the bridge itself, and the view from the middle takes in the castle on one bank and the old town on the other. It is busy in the imagery, which is accurate.

The Old Town Square is where the layers are clearest. A Gothic church with asymmetrical towers, a baroque one opposite, a fifteenth-century astronomical clock on the town hall, and a twentieth-century monument in the middle. The clock is the thing to zoom into: it shows the position of the sun and moon, the zodiac, and old Bohemian time on a separate ring.

The castle is not a building but a district, the largest ancient castle complex in the world by area, and it takes up the whole ridge above the river. The cathedral inside it took nearly six hundred years to finish. Golden Lane, a row of tiny houses built into the castle wall, was captured on foot and the scale of the doorways tells you a great deal about the people who lived there.

For the city beyond the postcard, go to Vinohrady or Žižkov. Both are late nineteenth-century apartment districts on hills east of the centre, with wide streets, big parks and none of the crowds. Žižkov has the television tower, a 1980s structure with sculpted babies crawling up it, which is either the best or worst thing in the city depending on who you ask.

One thing to look for. Prague's street signs are red and white enamel plates, and older buildings often carry a house sign as well, a painted or carved emblem such as a golden well or two suns. Houses were identified this way before numbering, and hundreds survive. Once you start noticing them in the imagery, the old town becomes a much richer thing to wander.