Google Street View, in collaboration with VisitBritain, will be capturing new imagery of almost all of the UK’s great British piers in celebration of British Tourism Week and ‘Party on the Pier’ 2011.
Google is supporting British Tourism Week by collaborating with VisitBritain to celebrate Britain’s iconic seaside landmarks. As a result of this collaboration, over the next few months Google will collect Street View imagery of the piers that will appear in Street View via Google MapsTM, for use by both Britons and tourists alike.
Two Street View ‘trikes’ will be on show during ‘Party on the Pier’ on Saturday 12th March – one at Weston-super-Mare and the other on Brighton Pier. Local media and public can see the trikes close up.
The great British pier has been an institution at our seaside for two centuries or more. Aside from promenades, buckets and spades, pop festivals and gastro pubs, few things can symbolise British seaside holidays as much as piers.
Developed in the early 1900’s, more than 100 of them once stretched out to sea around the country at the beginning of the last century – today, just 55 survive.
Once the imagery is live, these piers will be put right on the virtual map, tempting people at home and abroad to explore Britain’s seaside landmarks in an exciting new way. Piers which are being visited by the Google trike include Walton-on-the Naze Pier, Brighton Palace Pier, Brighton West Pier, Boscombe Pier, Eastbourne Pier, Weston Super Mare and Clevedon Pier. We hope to have most of the 55 current standing piers recorded by the end of the year.
The Google trike is a specially designed bike mounted with a camera. It comes replete with a very athletic cyclist in customised Google apparel. It has the same capability as the Street View cars for collecting street-level imagery and is designed to help Google make special imagery collections in places less accessible by cars, such as historic landmarks and coastal paths.
Images collected by the trike will be processed and carefully stitched together, a technological process that can take several months. They will be made available at a later date in Street View on Google Maps.
David Curtis-Brignall, Co-Chair, British Tourism Week said: “What better way to celebrate Party on the Pier and the fifth British Tourism Week than to have our great piers filmed for Google Street View.
“Using the expanded Street View service people can check out restaurant’s on piers before arriving, make travel plans, arrange meeting points on their favourite piers, get a helping hand with their holiday choices, or just get to know their pier better!”
Ed Parsons, Google’s Geospatial Technologist said:“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from British people to get their favourite places onto Street View. Now it’s down to our super fit tryclists to get cracking and photograph Britain’s top piers so that people from far and wide can soon admire a large part of the country’s seaside heritage .”
Tim Phillips, Chairman of the National Piers Society said: “Any opportunity to promote the nation’s piers around the globe is very welcome and Google is to be congratulated for offering this easy visual check on arguably the best attraction of our outstanding seaside destinations!”
