Explore Toronto in Google Street View

Toronto reads badly from above and well at street level, which makes it a good Street View city. From the air it is a grid with a cluster of towers at the bottom. At ground level it is a series of low-rise neighbourhoods with distinct building stock, separated by a system of wooded ravines that cut through the city like cracks in glass and that most visitors never notice at all.

The ravines are the thing worth going out of your way for. Toronto sits on land carved by creeks running down to the lake, and rather than filling them in, the city left them as parkland after a hurricane in 1954 made building in them plainly unwise. The result is around three hundred kilometres of wooded valley inside a city of three million, a good deal of it captured on foot, so you can drop from a residential street into what looks like forest in about two moves.

Downtown, the alleys are more interesting than the streets. Toronto has an extensive laneway network behind its main roads, originally for deliveries and coal, and a lot of it is now garages, back gardens, small houses and murals. Graffiti Alley, running behind Queen Street West for about a kilometre, is the one people know, and it was captured on foot, so you can follow the whole painted length of it.

Kensington Market is the neighbourhood that most rewards slow movement. It is a few blocks of narrow streets with Victorian houses converted into shops, painted in colours nobody coordinated, with produce and secondhand clothes on the pavement. It has resisted redevelopment for decades and the imagery reflects that: it looks improvised, because it is.

For the built history, the Distillery District is a preserved Victorian industrial complex, the largest surviving one in North America, kept because the whisky operation that filled it closed in 1990 and the buildings were listed rather than cleared. It is pedestrian, cobbled and covered on foot. The contrast with the condo towers built immediately around it since is visible in a single view.

The Toronto Islands are a short ferry from downtown and are covered. They are car-free, which makes the imagery entirely pedestrian, and the view back at the skyline from Ward's Island is the one every photograph of the city uses. What photographs do not show is that people live there, in a few hundred small houses on lanes with no vehicles, fifteen minutes from a financial district.