This is the photo which they claim is of Leicester prison:

As anyone from Leicester will realise, the photo in fact shows Regent College! The true Leicester prison is indicated with the red circle in the following aerial shot (courtesy of multimap.com); Regent College can be seen in the bottom right corner:

I don’t know if the owner of the website is trying to say something about students at Regent College (or about the teachers for that matter)! Let’s hope the exam papers are more accuate than the revision website.

Today I looked at the overview of Great Britain, and immediately noticed that the newest high resolution areas, which appear a different shade of green and so stand out, follow the shape of county boundaries. In northern England is West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester; in the east is Cambridgeshire; and to the south is Berkshire. In Wales, all of the unitary authorities of south Wales are covered with the exception of Monmouthshire; and let’s not forget the tiny County of Bristol across the Severn. It also appears that the West Midlands, Buckinghamshire and Surrey are currently being worked on, maybe from a different set of photos.

Compare the following images and you’ll see what I mean:

You can also view a map with the names of the counties. In Scotland, the cities of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, as well as Renfrewshire, have received the same treatment.

The high resolution photos are not just the approximate areas of the counties, but follow the boundaries exactly. So what does this mean? Surely if they were satellite photos, presumably from Google’s American supplier, the detailed patches would be square, or at best follow geographical features. The fact that they follow the shape of administrative areas makes me think these images probably come from a UK-based source. And most significantly, they are likely to be taken from an aircraft as the irregularly-shaped edges are quite different to the long, square strips that came from the satellites.

It’ll be interesting to see which counties they cover next. In the meantime, if you want to find somewhere in the areas I mentioned, you will be able to zoom right in.