Street View from Brum and Brizzle
Google Street View is now operational for a number of larger UK cities, including Birmingham, Oxford and Bristol.

If nothing else, it made me aware of just how massive the pedestrian area is in the centre of Birmingham. It is exceptionally difficult, for instance, to get a Google Street View of Birmingham's signature Rotunda building. Almost none of New Street is covered, neither is the shopping end of Corporation Street. I wonder if the city council could be approached to permit the Google Street View vans along the bus and taxi lanes which criss-cross the massive central pedestrian zone?

In other towns, roads have to lead up to the main shopping areas, in order for trucks to make deliveries. In Birmingham, built as it is on a huge hill which has been hollowed out for centuries, private tunnels take delivery trucks from relatively distant ringroads into loading areas below the pedestrian precincts. Have you ever wondered how the central Boots or WH Smiths branch gets stocked, or how parcels leave the main Post Office, given that they're slap bang in the middle of an entirely pedestrianised area? A question worth posing to Subterranea Britannica should they ever run out of Rotor bunkers to explore.

Update: I'm now wondering if the lack of coverage is actually due to pedestrianisation, or simple lack of being arsed. Google Street View doesn't seem to cover Hagley Road, one of Birmingham's more picturesque major arteries, and the Bristol coverage is so out-of-date that Cabot's Circus appears as a construction site. There's simply not the level of effort or quality been put into this, as went into the San Francisco coverage. A big damp squib IMHO.