The same spot on the same street, years apart — with the context to judge for yourself.
THEN—
⇄
NOW—
Pick a street to begin
Search a postcode, choose a starter street, or click a blue coverage line on the map. Both panes stay locked to the same viewpoint — drag either one and the other follows.
Volunteer photographs from Wikimedia Commons — tap a photo to enlarge.
Context for this comparison
What's actually here now (OpenStreetMap, 300 m radius)
Live from OpenStreetMap (volunteer-mapped) — a 0 can mean “not mapped here”, not “none”.
Retail premises over time, whole local authority (ONS Business Counts)
Currently active companies by registration date (Companies House, by outcode)
Governance & investment between these two photographs
Context, not causation. This shows who held office across the window — high streets are shaped by rents, retail economics and online shopping at least as much as by any government. Why we show it.
About & method
How to read this — and the honest limits of each layer. It's all context; the comparison is yours to judge.
Colour is not evidence
Older Street View was shot on earlier camera generations with narrower dynamic range and heavier compression, often in different seasons, weather and times of day. A flat, grey 2009 frame beside a vivid 2025 one says something about Google's hardware — not about the street. To judge change, look at occupancy, shopfronts, upkeep and use, and check the capture dates: the gap is rarely the tidy "16 years" the framing implies. Much of what reads as "decline" in viral side-by-sides is an artefact of the medium.
Politics — context, not causation
The politics strip is listed for context, not causation, and computed only from the two capture dates you've selected. High streets are shaped by council decisions, rents, retail economics and online shopping at least as much as by any government. This site takes no side. Council control is derived from Open Council Data UK (opencouncildata.co.uk, public domain); administrations for hung councils are added from cited sources where verified.
What's here now
Shop counts are counted live from OpenStreetMap — a volunteer-built map, not a commercial survey, so coverage varies by town and a missing tag is not a missing shop. There is no historical OSM, so the "then" side of this count cannot exist; treat it as today's inventory only.
Retail premises over time
The trend strip counts retail local units (SIC 47) across the whole local authority, from the ONS UK Business Counts series (Inter-Departmental Business Register, via Nomis). A local unit is an individual site — a shop, not a company — so it is the closest official measure to "shops on the ground", but it is authority-wide, not street-level; it starts in 2010, later than the oldest Street View; and it sees only VAT/PAYE-registered businesses, so the smallest traders are invisible. Administrative changes (a VAT-threshold move, re-registrations) can shift the series without a single shopfront changing.
Archive depth
Street View archive depth varies wildly. UK coverage begins around 2008–09, but the oldest capture at any given pin might be 2012 or 2015. The dates shown are the honest comparison window — not always the "16 years" the genre implies.
Photos taken near this pin
The photo strip searches Wikimedia Commons for geotagged photographs near the pin — within 150 m first, widening once to 500 m if nothing dated is found — and orders them by the date each photo was taken. Photos with no parseable taken date are left out entirely rather than sorted by upload date. The strip is not synced to the Street View comparison: these are volunteer photographs of the area, not the same viewpoint or the same dates, and volunteer geotags and dates can be wrong or coarse. Tap a photo to enlarge it in place.
Currently active companies by registration date
This counts companies registered in the pin's postcode district during the window between your two selected capture dates that are still on the register today, and shows the mix as a single composition bar: retail (SIC 47) versus hair & beauty (SIC 96020). Vape-adjacent is shown as a separate proxy count, not a bar slice, because it overlaps retail and can't be pinned down cleanly.
Survivorship bias: the snapshot lists only companies still on the register today, so dissolved companies are absent and earlier years are systematically undercounted. A registered office is not a shopfront (many register at an accountant's address; sole traders never appear), and this counts company formations, not premises. Vaping has no dedicated SIC code, so "vape-adjacent" is a proxy (tobacco retail SIC 47260 or a vape/vapour company name) and an estimate, never a count. "Barber" is SIC 96020, which also covers hairdressing and beauty salons; "retail" is every SIC beginning 47.
Today’s edition
Each day the site publishes one street from the archive with its older capture date withheld. You get one guess, in whole years; the reveal shows the true date and how far off you were, then the street opens as a normal comparison. Editions publish only when a street’s dates can be verified against the archive — on days when nothing verifies, there is no edition.
Support the project
Wayback Walk is free to use. Tips help cover the Google Maps API and hosting — nothing more is unlocked, and nothing about the method changes. Support on Ko-fi. Newsrooms commissioning a pack should use the press page.
This app runs entirely in your browser against the Google Maps JavaScript API. Paste a Maps Platform API key with Maps JavaScript API enabled (add Geocoding API for place-name search). The key is kept on this device only.
Historical panoramas are surfaced via metadata Google exposes informally rather than as a supported product — if the archive ever comes back empty everywhere, Google has probably moved the furniture.