I've been tracking this down for a while now and I've finally found confirmation of what I suspected: the current Google Maps imagery for Piha Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand was taken during setup for filming of Our Flag Means Death's Season 2, Episode 8!
On the left is the north end of Piha Beach with the inn set. On the right is the south end carpark with the film crew base.
Why is that cool to me? Because it truly was a fleeting moment in time, no more than a handful of days of possibility, and yet we can see it right now on Google Maps, at least until they update it. As an archaeologist I love a moment preserved in time.
The specifics of how I pinned down the imagery and the date are in this Twitter thread, but the short version is, I was hunting for a better visual on the area immediately surrounding the inn while writing Full Fathom Five, and noticed that the carpark in particular seemed to line up exactly with images from the final day of filming.
The final day of filming overall was 13 December 2022, filming at Piha was on 12 December 2022, and this aerial image was taken on 11 December 2022.
I had already been through the first image to make a comparison to the aerial map and it looked like a match, but Google Maps had 2024 in their attribution. [Noting that I'd put 13 Dec on my image notes, but I'd got that tangled with the last day of filming in the KumeΕ« studio the next day, and it was 12 Dec on location].
Thankfully Google Earth came through with the actual date.
Which means we now know that for now, if you hop onto Google Maps (not Google Earth, because they have a different image for the north end that does come from 2024) and zing on down to Piha Beach, you can take a look at a preserved moment in time from the filming of S2Ep8.
You can hop straight to the inn here.
And straight to the parking lot here.
And remember to put the layers into Satellite mode to view the aerial imagery.
Everything that's shown at the north end lines up with what we've seen both in the show and in behind the scenes content, all of which I delved into in this Twitter thread last month. That goes into a lot more detail about specifics, but the evidence is solid across the board.
The sandy path that runs beside the inn is a distinct feature seen in the show.
The peak that sits behind it, likewise (from Google Maps user uploads here and here).
The inn itself, and the way the path gives way to an unseen carpark, from Simone Nathan's TikTok video.
Based on all of that, it's easy to see that we've got our inn right here circled in red, preserved in that moment in time, even though it was no doubt taken down as soon as filming was done.
Prep looks like it took a couple of days before filming; filming was pretty much done in a day, according to an article at the time.
So, there you have it- it's a minor little thing and it won't be up forever, but for now you can hop into Google Maps and see an aerial view adjacent to the filming of S2Ep8 at Piha. The other beach scenes from Eps 1, 3 and 8 were filmed at Te Henga/ Bethells Beach.
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