Google launches Street View in the UK

Street-level imagery of 25 UK cities, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds and London, is now available in Google Earth and Google Maps.

Google Street View enables users to view 360-degree panoramic street-level photos covering 22,369 miles of road.

Ed Parsons, Google's geospatial technologist, said: "Street View has been hugely popular with our users in Europe and worldwide and we're thrilled it's now available in the UK for so many great cities, enabling users to see street-level panoramas of major city roads and look up and print out useful driving directions."

In areas where Street View is available, users can access street-level imagery by zooming into the lowest level on Google Maps.

Alternatively they can drag the orange man on the left-hand side of the map onto a blue highlighted street.

People can also use the maps to check out a restaurant before arriving, make travel plans and arrange meeting points.

In order to safeguard privacy, Google said Street View only contains imagery that is already visible from public roads.

Number plates and people’s faces are also blurred. If a user has any privacy concerns they can use the 'Report a concern' button on the site to inform Google of content they feel is inappropriate.