Site shows London in high-resolution

The directory inquires site 192.com is offering what it claims are the highest-resolution aerial images of London available online.

The 4cm-per-pixel images are said to be equivalent to looking down from a ten-storey building and allow you easily to pick out individual people and cars.

The images cover only part of London, from the western edge of Hyde Park to Dartford, east of the city; and from Finsbury Park in North London to Tooting Bec in the south.

Sensitive sites such as 10 Downing Street, which was mortared by the IRA in 1991, have been blanked out.

Dominic Blackburn, technology director at the site, the whole city could not be covered because of flight restrictions around Heathrow. "We now have a clear lead on all other mapping websites such as Google and MSN and Multimap, giving our maps clearer detail and far better quality," he said.

The aerial photography is divided into 24 million map tiles, occupying 6Gbytes. Other maps at 192.com are limited to 12.5cm-per-pixel resolution.

The resolution for London is so high that the pictures sometimes show their age. The image for my home in North London shows in the road outside a confection of barriers and bollards that the local council optimistically called a traffic calming measure; happily this was taken down some months ago, before anyone actually died trying to negotiate it.

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