Explore San Francisco in Google Street View

San Francisco is one of the five cities Street View launched with in May 2007, alongside New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. That matters when you get here, because it means the history control has almost two decades of depth. On a good many streets you can step back to the original 2007 capture, and the difference between then and now in the Mission or in SoMa is not subtle: whole blocks have been replaced.

The hills are the thing the imagery conveys better than photographs do. A photograph flattens a gradient; Street View does not, because you move up it in steps and the horizon tilts. Filbert Street between Hyde and Leavenworth runs at 31.5 per cent, which is steep enough that the pavement is stepped rather than sloped, and moving up it on screen gives you a genuine sense of what that number means.

The grid is the reason for the hills being so dramatic. The city was laid out on a rectangular street plan by surveyors who ignored the topography entirely, so roads run straight over the tops of hills rather than around them. The result is the view San Francisco is known for: a street that appears to end in mid-air because the far side drops away, with the bay in the gap. Almost any north-south street in Russian Hill or Nob Hill does this.

Lombard Street exists because of that decision. The famous block between Hyde and Leavenworth was too steep for vehicles at its original gradient, so in 1922 the city put eight switchbacks into a single block to bring the effective slope down. It is a piece of engineering rather than a piece of design, which is a better reason to look at it than the flowerbeds.

For the parts of the city with the most to look at, go to the Mission and to Haight-Ashbury. The Mission has the murals, particularly in Clarion Alley and Balmy Alley, both of which are narrow enough that they were captured on foot and both of which change repeatedly, so the history slider here shows a genuinely different wall each pass. Haight-Ashbury is Victorian housing stock, painted, largely intact, and the reason so much of the city looks the way it does.

The Golden Gate Bridge is covered on the roadway and on the pedestrian walkway, which are two entirely different experiences. From the road you get the towers and the traffic; from the walkway you get the cables at arm's length and the drop to the water. Take the walkway, and then look south at the city, which from that angle sits low and white behind the headland.