New writer: Cédric Cédric lives in Germany where he works for the science and education department of one of Germany’s regional public radio and TV stations. He has a life-long project to see the world, especially by train.

The invention of the road was probably rather quickly followed by the idea of the bridge, simply because wet feet are pretty annoying when travelling. And so, over the course of thousands of years, many, many bridges were built. The beginnings were humble, and none of the very early wooden constructions survive.

However, with the invention of the arch over three thousand years ago, things got moving (and spanning). At first, arches were crude, but nevertheless the results proved to be solid; the three Arkadiko Bridges, built by Mycenaean Greeks at the end of the Bronze Age in around 1200 BC, are still with us – and one is even still in usable shape today.

In even better shape are the Tarr Steps, a “clapper bridge” in southern England, which was probably built around 1000 BC. The Tarr Steps are made of raw stone slabs weighing several tons apiece; some of which have occasionally been carried up to 50 m downstream during floods, but they’ve always been placed back on their piers afterwards.

With the rise and expansion of the Roman Empire came architects and engineers, who had more modern building materials such as cement and concrete at their disposal. The Romans built smoothly paved roads, palaces, temples and thermal baths¹ all over the Empire, as well as the first truly large-scale bridges for roads and water. Many of these Roman viaducts and aqueducts are still in amazingly good shape today.

One of the most famous Roman aqueducts is the two thousand year old Pont du Gard, a three level, 50 metre (165 ft) high structure that forms part of a water conduit over 40km (25 miles) long which carried water to the Roman town of Nemausus, today’s Nîmes.

About the same age is the Pont Saint-Martin, spanning the river Lys with an arch of over 30m (100 ft) – one of the widest arches of the time². Amazingly it’s still in day-to-day use.

After the Romans had left (or were kicked out of) most of Europe by around AD 600, large-scale bridge building hit a bit of a recession. Big bridges for big roads were no longer needed to facilitate the Empire’s infantry deployments, and the big workforces (i.e., lots of slaves) weren’t that readily available any more.

Wet feet were still widely out of fashion though, and as traffic increased, the local Europeans eventually built their own big bridges. Nearly 900 years old is Avignon’s Pont Saint-Bénezet, better known as the Pont d’Avignon.

Over the course of 500 years, the Pont d’Avignon repeatedly collapsed due to heavy floods and shoddy repairs, and it was eventually abandoned in 1668. Today, less than a fifth of its original length remains.

In some other places, wet feet were so unpopular that bridge builders just kept on building. The 800-year-old Swarkestone Bridge in England’s Midlands not only crosses the Trent, but also adjacent swamp lands.

At over a kilometre long, the Swarkestone Bridge is England’s longest stone bridge, and in daily use by hundreds of drivers. However, its builders never imagined their work to be so heavily used; after nearly eight centuries of stability, the Swarkestone Bridge and Causeway is in dire need of repairs.

With constant population growth, traffic increased everywhere. Local traffic in the emerging metropolises proved to be especially annoying. In Paris, this lead to Henry III (the French one) ordering the construction of a new bridge across the Seine river in 1578. Finished in 1607, it became the Pont Neuf, or “New Bridge”.

Ironically, the Pont Neuf is now Paris’ oldest surviving bridge, and it’s surviving very well. Open to normal road traffic in the heart of Paris, the then nearly 400-year-old construction had to bear a load of 10,000 cars a day until the introduction of new traffic routes in 2004. It’s much quieter today, but still crossed by hundreds of drivers every day.

Bridges have always been more than a mere Thing To Cross Things. A big bridge was also a display of power and technological prowess. Bridges not only had to be useful, but also had to intimidate enemies and impress friends. Many bridges in big cities are much more elaborately built than would be dictated by mere necessity, be it the impressive Tower Bridge³ in London, or Rialto Bridge in Venice.

A new bridge’s look is still of great importance nowadays, despite a certain lack of enemies in need of intimidation. They please locals, appeal to tourists and serve as interesting landmarks. New bridges are often built according to beautiful and unique designs despite almost always being more expensive than is strictly required.

Modern building materials and techniques allow for much greater freedom in forms and shapes, with often stunning results. Over the last decades, some truly beautiful, big, delicate, or simply weird bridges have been built, such as the Gateshead Millennium Bridge which implements a novel lift bridge concept, or the previously featured Wasserstraßenkreuz Magdeburg, which allows a shipping canal to cross a river.

Today, bridges routinely span more than a kilometre without touching ground. They brave storms and earthquakes, relying not on divine protection but on engineers’ ingenuity. However, modern industrial materials, despite their incredible properties, have a significantly lower life expectancy than bare rock. A thousand years from now, there probably won’t be too many bridges left of those built over the last few decades – while some roman or mediaeval constructions have a fair chance of still being around to amaze and impress our descendants.

We adore bridges here at Google Sightseeing, and to prove it, our Bridges category features nearly 100 of the world’s most fascinating bridges.

New writer: Chris Hannigan Chris is from Savannah, Georgia, USA where he works as a computer lab instructor for a major aerospace company. Previously employed by an airline, Chris has flown to many places around the world and continues to travel with his family today.

This post is part of an occasional series where we visit some of the world’s most interesting abandoned places.

On April 26, 1986, reactor number four at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster in history. The explosion itself killed 56 people, but the accident caused four hundred times more fallout than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; the full consequences of which have yet to be realised.

GSS have visited Chernobyl twice before, but this article will discuss the city of Prypiat, Ukraine, which was home to a population of over 50,000 residents before the accident, and which today is merely a ghost town.

The city sits right in the middle of a 30km exclusion zone around the plant. Trees and weeds have grown over most of the streets and buildings, but remarkably much of the town is still intact. Schools¹, parks, a stadium, and even a ferris wheel can still be seen today.

On the day following the explosion, government workers ordered the residents to evacuate. Many families were told they would only be gone for three days, but the evacuation was actually permanent. As a result, many buildings within the town still contain personal belongings that were left behind by their owners. Items such as TVs, furniture, children’s toys, and clothing can be seen inside the buildings, left just where they were on the day of the accident.

As a result of the fallout from the explosion, much of the land around the city has been designated “inappropriate for farming or agriculture” for the next 200 years. One area hit especially hard is known as the Red Forest. These woods, just south of Prypiat, turned a deep red colour after the explosion, and slowly the trees began to die as a result of the radiation. Eventually, much of the woods were bulldozed and buried, but they remain one of the most contaminated areas in the world.

Following some of the roads out of the city will lead to the control points that secure the 30 km exclusion zone around the plant. These checkpoints are staffed by guards and police.

Even with all of the potential health hazards of visiting the city today, several Ukrainian companies actually offer guided tours of the area. If you plan on visiting Prypiat yourself, make your way to the nearby town of Chernobyl, another settlement evacuated by the disaster. There, a few apartments, a lodge, and even a hotel exist and are still in use today.

Prypiat and the Chernobyl disaster are of course well documented on Wikipedia.

New writer: Daniel Chapman Daniel recently graduated from the University of New Orleans with a degree in urban planning but grew up in the UK. He is currently planning to move to Mexico to teach English before beginning his real career of championing intelligent city design.

The city of Norilsk lies 320km north of the Arctic Circle in the frigid tundra of Siberia. It is the second largest city north of the Arctic Circle (after Murmansk), and the northernmost city in the world with a population over 100,000. It also holds an unenviable spot among the ten most polluted cities on earth thanks to the massive nickel mining operation in the area.

Due to pollution, not a single tree grows within 45km of the largest of four nickel smelters, Nadezhda¹, and it’s estimated that Norilsk contributes 1% of all sulphur dioxide released into the earth’s atmosphere.

The city itself was built with Gulag labour under the direction of Joseph Stalin, and in true Stalinist fashion, the cityscape is dominated by massive apartment blocks spaced along wide boulevards.

In 1953-54, prison labourers assigned the task of building the city staged what has become known as the Norilsk uprising. The “uprising” was actually unarmed, so the term settled upon by the authorities was “mass insubordination”. While dissent was common in the Gulag system, the uprising in Norilsk was the largest such rebellion under Stalin’s iron-fisted rule.

Many thousands of prison labourers died in the extremely harsh conditions while building the city: Norilsk is covered by snow between 250 and 270 days a year with temperatures as low as -58°C having been recorded.

After reading all this, you’re probably about ready to book your next holiday to this lovely utopia. Not so fast. Norilsk is closed to foreigners without a really good reason to go, and travel to the city is restricted even among Russian nationals. The reason for this could be to cover up the massive scale of pollution, or it could have something to do with the many ICBM silos nearby. Any other theories?

There’s more information about Norilsk at Wikipedia.

Google have just expanded Street View’s coverage to 14 countries with the addition of 11 Canadian cities and regions¹, and the Czech city of Prague.

We’ve already found some great Street View sights, which you can see on our brand-new Street View page or even better, follow us on Twitter to get the latest sights the moment we find them.

Montreal’s Olympic stadium was one of the very first sights we posted to Google Sightseeing, when the site was just 3 days old. Now 4 and half years later, we get a much better view of the bizarre building and the world’s tallest inclined structure.

Outside the stunning Canadian Parliament building we can see Tamil protestors, calling for action on the Sri Lankan Civil War. They protested non-stop throughout most of April 2009.

Probably Canada’s most recognisable landmark, the CN Tower in Toronto can be spotted from miles around. This unique view, complete with truck about to crash into the tower, comes from the CTV’s television station.

The impressive Czech National Museum sits atop Prague’s Wenceslas Square. The facade had to undergo major repairs following severe gunfire damage during the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention.

Have you found anything cool on the new Street View? Send us a tweet so we can tell the world!

Island Week 4 should have finished at the end of last week, but we’ve got a bonus island post before we resume normal service.

Despite being just off the coast of France, the Channel Islands are British Crown dependencies famous for being the only part of the British Commonwealth occupied by Germany during WWII, and the centuries-old rivalry between the two principle islands of Guernsey and Jersey.

Although usually considered one unit, the islands are actually made of two distinct administrations, which share very few laws and institutions, named the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey.

The Bailiwick of Guernsey consists of seven inhabited islands, the largest of which is Guernsey itself, and various other islets and rocks. Guernsey was heavily fortified by the occupying Nazis during WWII, much more than was really necessary, and many of these fortifications remain.

Making up part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey is Alderney, a quiet little island to the North, which was almost completely evacuated to mainland Britain prior to the German invasion. 4 concentration camps were built on Alderney, and at least 400 graves have been found.

Sark’s odd claim to fame is that it was the last feudal state in Europe. These days, the population of 600 are proud of their traditional ways, which include the complete lack of any cars on the island.

The Bailiwick of Jersey’s only inhabited island is just Jersey itself. The lack of VAT charged in Jersey meant that it was, for a time, used by Amazon and Tesco for shipping out cheap DVDs and CDs to the UK.

Jersey and Guernsey’s rivalry stems from the English Civil War, when Jersey sided with Royalists and Guernsey sided with Parliament. Each has their own pound notes, police force, and famous breed of cow.

More information on Wikipedia for the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey.

Thanks to James Bridle