For diehard music fans, visiting the exact location where your favorite album cover was shot is a necessary pilgrimage (this is true of even non-diehards: surely not every tourist who’s crossed Abbey Road with a long stride and a purpose has actually obsessively listened to the record). But thanks to Google and The Guardian, you no longer have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars trekking to one particular set of geographic coordinates. Now, you can see these famous places from comfort of your own computer screen. As part of The Guardian’s Google Street View series, their “Street View Specialist” has pinpointed the exact locations immortalized on classic album covers, then set them against each other like poetic little windows into the past.
From Pink Floyd’s Animals to Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, it’s cool to see the surrounding area around these tiny squares that we’ll remember forever. And in some cases, as with Eminem’s childhood home, things that appear on the album covers no longer exist — so sliding the cover over the Street View scene it is to briefly restore a missing piece of history.
Click through the gallery for some virtual strolls down memory lane, then head over to The Guardian to see the other Street View series: classic paintings of world cities and 18th-century London paintings.
Image Credit: The Guardian
Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique
Image Credit: The Guardian
PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
Image Credit: The Guardian
Pink Floyd, Animals
Image Credit: The Guardian
Oasis, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Image Credit: The Guardian
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
Image Credit: The Guardian
Jackson Browne, Late for the Sky
Image Credit: The Guardian
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP
Image Credit: The Guardian
Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
Image Credit: The Guardian
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willy and the Poor Boys
Image Credit: The Guardian
The Beatles, Abbey Road