As the image updates that we reported last week have now made it to Google Maps, there’s now almost complete coverage of the whole of England, and we’ve had a ton of great locations submitted. So to kick off we’re starting in the capital, London.

This is London’s brand new Wembley Stadium, which although still under construction in these images, has been officially open since March 2007 (albeit a year late). It cost a staggering £798 million (about $1.57 Billion U.S.), which makes it easily the most expensive stadium ever built,

It’s an all-seated 90,000 capacity stadium (which makes it the second largest capacity stadium in Europe¹), and is protected from the elements by a sliding roof – which gives it the largest roof-covered seating capacity in the world (fortunately, the stadium also contains more toilets than any other venue in the world – 2,618 in total).

The white arc on the north side of the thumbnail is a gargantuan arch which supports the whole weight of the north roof and 60% of the weight of the southern side’s retractable roof. It’s 7 metres wide and spans some 315 metres, incredibly it stands at 22° from vertical and still rises to 140 metres!

According to Guinness World Records 2006, this arch is the world’s longest unsupported roof structure.

Nearby we can also see the White Horse bridge, so named after a Metropolitan Police horse that was used to restore order after ~200,000 spectators, who turned up to witness the 1923 FA Cup final, spilled onto the pitch before kick off. (Wikipedia)

P.S. Apologies for the downtime recently, we’re still trying to iron out issues with our new forums.

Thanks to Kerry and AndrewAnorak.

Paris Hilton, heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune, was recently sentenced to 45 days in jail for violating her probation when she was caught driving at 70mph in a 35mph zone, as her license had been suspended for a previous drink driving offence.

Before she ever got to prison however, her sentence was reduced to 23 days – and yesterday, after only three full days, Paris was released from jail to spend the rest of her sentence under house arrest.

That’s right, she’s now confined to her very own 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 2.707 square foot, $1.7 million home in the West Hollywood hills for the rest of her sentence.

Tough break Paris.

As long as you haven’t been hiding under a rock, then you’ll have heard about Google Maps’ new Street Views, which allow you to walk down the virtual streets of 5 major U.S. cities. Unsurprisingly perhaps, there’s been a great deal of interest in the bizarre, humorous and risqué sights captured in these new images.

We’ve been getting loads of submissions of these findings, but as they’re mostly not of the kind of thing that we normally post on Google Sightseeing, we’ve instead decided to start Street View Sightseeing on our brand new Google Sightseeing Forums!

The Street Views forum allows you to post your own findings to share with the rest of our readers, and every now and then we’ll pick out the very best and feature them here on the main page of Google Sightseeing.

As well as the Street View forum, today we’re also launching a General Discussion Forum where users are free to discuss anything at all, Google Sightseeing related or otherwise. So please take a moment to register an account and say hello on the forums!

We’ll be developing the forums further over time, but for the moment a handy advantage of registering is that your account will be integrated into Google Sightseeing, so you’ll be able to post comments without entering your details over and over, and you’ll even be able to edit your own comments!

Awesome huh?

Finally, please bear in mind that our forums are still being actively developed (as always, this is a beta) so may be a little rough around the edges at the moment! (If you have any feedback regarding how the forums look, how they work, or how you’d like them to work, then let us know in the Bugs / Feature Requests area.)

Onward to the forums!

In the yard of Scheveningen prison, the Hague, the incredibly high resolution aerial photography has captured this prison inmate doing press ups!

As an aside, this is actually the prison where the former communist President of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević was held for 5 years before his death in March 2006, shortly before his trial was due to end.

Thanks to gozoman

Here at GGSS we’ve previously featured rooftop and field-based marriage proposals which, for some unknown reason, are highly likely to feature misspellings or bad grammar.

So we’re very pleased to see that the latest finding, the words “Marry Me Tammy” written in a field, do pass our strict criteria for aerial-based marriage proposals. Congratulations!

However, some may call the suitor (a man named Brian) a cheater: he enlisted outside help to create his proposal! The giant writing was actually written by mapping specialists GISmatters for the reality television program ‘Perfect Proposal’.

The 100-foot high letters, claimed to be the World’s Largest Marriage Proposal, were revealed to Tammy from the window of an aeroplane back in 2004.

Thanks: Brian