Ah, the English summer: Pimm’s on the lawn, sandcastles on the beach, socks inside sandals, and the gentle sound of leather on willow. Yes, along with tennis, the nation’s sporting thoughts at this time of year turn to cricket – and, this month, to the Twenty20 World Cup.

Cricket mystifies many people from outside the former British Empire¹. Quite apart from its arcane terminology (googlies and doosras; backward short leg and silly mid off), some struggle to see the appeal of a game where you can play for five days and still end up with a draw.

In recent years though, a new and – dare we say it? – more exciting form of the game has become increasingly popular. In Twenty20 cricket, as the name suggests, each side bats for only 20 overs² and essentially just tries to slog the ball for as many runs as possible. Purists complain that this takes all the finesse out of the game and could spell the death of Test cricket³, but many fans are just happy to be able to watch a complete match without having to take a week off work…

2009’s Twenty20 World Cup, the second in the event’s history⁴, is being contested by 12 nations at three venues in England, two of which are in London. First up is Lord’s, where the final will be held on June 21.

Often called “the home of cricket”, this is the headquarters of the world’s oldest cricket club, the MCC⁵. The current location, which dates from 1814, is actually the third incarnation. Thomas Lord built his first ground in the area in 1787, near the site of present-day Dorset Square, then a second which had to be abandoned due to the building of the Regent’s Canal.

It looks as if there was a match being played on the day the Street View car drove past Lord’s, judging by the marshals and crowds. Let’s hope those big black clouds went away!

We head south of the River Thames for our next venue: The Oval, or, to give it its proper corporate-sponsored name, The Brit Insurance Oval.

This ground dates from 1845 and in 1880 became the first venue in England to hold a Test match (England v Australia). Two years later, after Australia beat the home nation at The Oval, a mock newspaper obituary mourned the death of English cricket, stating “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”; to this day the two nations compete for The Ashes.

The Oval hasn’t always hosted cricket though: the first ever international football⁶ match took place here in 1870 (England v Scotland), and all but one of the first 20 FA Cup finals were held here. Despite being in the London Borough of Lambeth, The Oval is the home ground of Surrey County Cricket Club.

Street View doesn’t show too much of the ground itself, but one of the large gasometers to the north, a well-known landmark associated with the venue, is clearly visible.

The last of our three locations is a hundred miles or so to the north, in Nottingham. Trent Bridge is the home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and takes its name, unsurprisingly, from the adjacent bridge which carries the main London road over the River Trent.

Cricket has been played on the site since the 1830s, when Nottinghamshire’s club captain married the landlady of the Trent Bridge Inn, and set up a ground in the meadow behind it. The impressive pavilion was built in 1886 and served as a military hospital during the first world war. It can be seen in Street View, but only end-on.

Also on view are the smart new stands and floodlights that were completed last year. A rather less lovely landmark of the ground is the ugly office block that was built after a corner of the ground was sold off in the 1960s.

If you haven’t learned enough about cricket yet, you can read more about Lord’s, The Oval and Trent Bridge at Cricinfo.

When the Romans invaded Britain in the 1st century AD, they never quite managed to conquer Caledonia – the area now known as Scotland.

We’ll never know whether the Roman army felt it was too much like hard work to defeat the fearsome northern tribes, or were simply under-attired for the fearsome Scottish weather; either way, in AD 122 the Roman Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a wall to defend his territory from the lands to the north.

Hadrian’s Wall stretched for 80 Roman miles (73.5 modern-day miles, or 117km), from the Solway Firth (where the wall is still visible) to the River Tyne (where the wall has vanished, but the fort of Segedunum, which marked its eastern end, has been excavated).

Despite being almost 2,000 years old (and having been heavily plundered by the locals for building materials after the Romans left), a surprising amount of the wall can still be seen today. One of the best preserved stretches is near the village of Gilsland. Here you can also see the foundations of the Roman bridge across the River Irthing – although since it was built the course of the river has shifted westwards.

There are an astonishing number of Roman sites in this area, as a look at the Ordnance Survey map shows. Among them are Birdoswald fort; the nicely preserved milecastle 48¹ (right next to the spot where the railway line slices through the wall); and a couple of Roman camps. The shadows on the aerial photography really show up the traces of old structures and ditches, even where there is little else left on the ground.

The wall was not a single structure: at various stages in its history it was extended, and separate banks and ditches added. Among the later additions was the Vallum, consisting of three earth banks separated by ditches, running parallel to the wall a few hundred metres to the south. The surviving stretches also show up well in aerial imagery; if you scroll northwards from this point you can see the wall itself.

In many places, the builders used the natural topography to help create a formidable barrier. One spectacular stretch of wall follows a steep rocky ridge, Highshield Crags.

The low angle of the sun creates some dramatic shadows here – and if you zoom right in, you can see the shadow of a sycamore tree in the hollow between two ridges. This location, known as Sycamore Gap, will be familiar to fans of the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: it’s the spot where Kevin Costner rescued a small boy from the dastardly Guy of Gisbourne.²

Read more about Hadrian’s Wall at Wikipedia. The 84-mile-long Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail follows the course of the wall, and its website has a great gallery of ground-level photos.

A well known landmark to locals and holidaymakers is the little house that sits atop an island off the shore of Towan Beach in Newquay, England. Featured in many postcards, “The Island House”, as it is known, has become symbolic of Newquay itself.

The Island has been used as a rather small potato farm, a chicken run, a Sunday School classroom, an art gallery, a guest house, and a tea room. However, today it is the home of the 4th Viscount Long and his wife Lady Helen.

To get to the Island House one must cross a 30-metre long miniature suspension foot bridge.

The footbridge was supposedly modelled after the suspension bridge in Bristol.

The Island was kept from being entered into Guinness as the “World’s Smallest Full-time Inhabited Island” by a European Union directive in 2003 that classified islands as having at least fifty people living on them. So the Island House should actually be called the Outcrop House.

Lady Helen once quipped,

Being referred to as Lady of the Outcrop sounds like I have a bad case of chickenpox.

Headington, a suburb of the famous university city of Oxford, is the only known habitat of the aerial shark, a rare but fearsome predator that dives on its unsuspecting victims from heights of over a quarter of a mile. Incredibly, Google’s Street View car has managed to capture the aftermath of a horrific aerial shark attack!

Okay, we made that up. This 25ft-long shark is actually made out of fibreglass¹, and was thrust through the roof of number 2 New High Street in 1986 in the name of art. Bill Heine, who commissioned the sculpture and still owns the house, says he did it “to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation… It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki.”

The shark has since become a local landmark, but it nearly didn’t survive: soon after it was erected, Oxford City Council ruled that putting a shark through your roof without planning permission simply wouldn’t do, and ordered it to be taken down. Bill appealed, and in a rare show of common sense, the government decided it could stay².

Unfortunately, when the Street View image was captured, the house was covered in scaffolding. To see it in all its glory, go to the official shark site.

Thanks to Cyan and Julian.

While many malls, theme parks and stadiums may boast large car parks, most pale in comparison to car storage facilities like the one at the former RAF base in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.

After 43 years of service to British and US forces, the base was closed in 1993. Today the runways, taxiways and stands are home to countless¹ thousands of cars and other vehicles. Just off the main runway we can even see a transport truck delivering or removing some vehicles.

Further west, Royal Portbury Dock in Bristol handles well over half a million vehicles every year, with areas dedicated to many of the major car manufacturers.

Many of the vehicles have white plastic covers to protect the bodywork during shipping. And on the quayside cars are being loaded onto a ship for transport.

Although there’s always one person who doesn’t read the memo about colour-coordinated parking, isn’t there?

In the port of Vancouver we find a similar operation, with the north-eastern end of Annacis Island serving as a rail / sea terminal for vehicles.

We see rail cars and a ship with ramps deployed to receive or unload vehicles.

And again, there’s always one…

Where are the largest car parks in your part of the world?

Thanks to Gareth Smart and Fabio Ferrari.