Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff, Wales, is named after everyone’s favourite Children’s author Roald Dahl who was born here in the Capital, and the word “plass”, meaning “plaza”, is a nod to his parent’s Norwegian origins.

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who or the Torchwood spin-off, then you’ll immediately recognise this as being the location of a spatio-temporal rift in time¹.

At the north end of the plaza stands a 21m tall water fountain (which hides the entrance to the secret Torchwood underground cave).

The south-east of the Plaza is home to the National Assembly for Wales, the Senedd. We looked for the Senedd before while touring the United Kingdom’s devolved assemblies, but it wasn’t finished then.

At the north-east of the square is the Wales Millennium Centre, a hall for performing arts. The front of the building has an enormous Welsh poem written across its entire face using the medium of windows. You can read the windows in Microsoft’s bird’s eye view imagery.

There’s more information on Roald Dahl Plass and Cardiff Bay on Wikipedia.

Thanks to AndrewAnorak, Jam, braddie, and Andrew Shackson.

Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres¹ in the US – perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres.

Despite being just south of a town called Goodyear, this is actually the work of a company called Envirotech Industries International, who have been collecting tyres here for the last 10 years.

The company used to recycle the tyres, and intended to start converting the old tyres into fuel – until the state of Arizona closed them down for multiple serious fire-code violations. Envirotech subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the State of Arizona responsible for the facility.

The imagery at Microsoft’s Live service has better resolution, allowing us to see individual tyres that have fallen from the huge piles (one of the breaches of the fire regulations was “Obstructed fire roads”).

If a fire were to break out here, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office have stated that it could “burn unhindered for over ten years”. To put that into perspective, in 1999 it took 250 firefighters 5 days to get a fire at a facility in Ohio under control – and it took a further nine years and more than $32 million to clean up the mess.

There are an estimated 3 billion waste tires stockpiled in the United States, and when they catch fire the environmental fallout can be catastrophic. Government reports stated that the pollution from the 1999 Ohio fire killed more than 10,000 fish in a nearby creek.

The Sonoran Desert National Monument is a small part of the 311,000 km² Sonoran Desert – home to several endangered species, and the most biologically diverse of all the North American deserts.

Read the full story at azcentral.com.

Thanks to kjfitz.

Giants have a hard time getting clean. I mean, baths aren’t usually built big enough to fit your average giant, right? Which is the only sensible explanation as to why there’s a giant sitting in the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain.

Here’s a few ground-level photos to quell the unbelievers.

Thanks to Jimbo.

Another month, another image update! Frank at gearthblog.com seems to have been first to spot that there’s new imagery in Google Earth, which has now been confirmed on the Latlong Blog.

Currently unavailable in Google Maps¹, the new imagery includes:

• USA: San Diego, San Francisco metro area, Wenatchee (WA), New Mexico.
• Canada: Quebec, New Westminster (BC).
• England: Bristol
• Spain: Barcelona, Costa del Sol, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Cuenca, Toledo, Caceres, Zaragoza.
• Portugal: Braga, new base imagery for entire country
• Italy: Rome, Naples
• Germany: Freidburg, Munich
• Australia: Brisbane, Great Barrier Reef
• Taiwan: Taipei, Taichung
• New 2.5m base imagery for: The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Taiwan, Tasmania, and parts of Mexico, China, and Australia.

Found anything amazing on the new imagery? Then let us know!

While I don’t admit to possess a particularly green thumb, I do have a penchant for anything which either looks good from the air, or lays claim to unnecessary, ambiguous World Records. Just like here at the Royal Botanic Gardens, or simply Kew Gardens, London, England.

A Royal Palace is usually a great place for a day out, but Kew’s is rather lacklustre, taking the title of the Smallest Palace in Britain. Nevertheless, it was the family home of George III, and it is here that he suffered his ‘madness’¹, which was presumably caused by the cost of the garden’s upkeep.

Sitting in the far corner of the gardens is the Great Pagoda which stands a pretty impressive 49 metres high. At the time it was built in 1763, it was the tallest Chinese-inspired structure in Europe. During World War 2, the towers were modified to test the way in which bombs fell, and today it affords rather splendid views over the Gardens, as these photos show.

When I started writing for Google Sightseeing, I decided as a rule never to post about compost heaps that I had found. I changed my tune entirely when I discovered Kew was home to the largest compost heap in the World, complete with its own viewing deck! The majority of this vast compost heap is used on the plants at Kew, some is actually auctioned off for charity.²

At almost 5000 square metres in area, and holding the title of Largest Victorian Glasshouse in the World, the Temperate House really is vast (twice the size of the nearby Palm House). At the centre of the Temperate House is the Chilean wine-palm, which at a heady 16 metres, towers into the record books as the World’s largest Indoor Plant.

This snazzy structure is the Princess of Wales’ conservatory, opened in 1987, its design is quite blatantly stolen from blueprints of Darth Vadar’s Star Destroyer. Within this and the other glasshouses, Kew has over 30,000 living plants, and 7 million seed specimens.

Find out more about Kew at their official website, and at Wikipedia, whilst there are loads of photos at flickr. Thanks to Lindsay Marshall, Stephen Train and Tom.