On the Street Where I Was Born

Recently, on my technology blog, I wrote about the mixed reception that Google Street View has received in England, land of my birth. I admit to having mixed feelings about this technology myself.

It is very easy to be seduced by technology that enables me to sit in a cottage on a hill in the wilds of Upstate New York and capture this image of the street in England where I was born. (Just to clarify, I was not born in the street, but in one of the houses on this street--home birth by midwife being the normal practice in England in the 1950s.)

The most obvious change in the last 50 years is the number of cars on the street. There were  practically none when I was born. You could easily play 20 minutes of football in the road without being disturbed. Now there are too many vehicles, which is why many front gardens have been replaced with parking spaces--compare the original gardens on the left with the parking pads on the right. And so it goes...