one streetback

Why One Street Back exists

In Lecce we did what visitors do. We ate in the old town, in restaurants with hundreds of good reviews, and the food was poor. Then we walked out of the old town into streets of offices, flats and good shops: Via Cesare Battisti, Via Zanardelli, a Max Mara. The cafés there served the people who work and live on those streets, and everything we ate was better.

A couple of years earlier, in Waterford, it was the pubs. Locals at the bar, their dogs at their feet, nobody on holiday but us.

A city's sights belong to everyone. Its neighbourhoods belong to the people who live in them, and that is where everyday life goes on: the bakery that opens at seven, the bar where the regulars know each other's dogs.

We use a simple test. If a street has a dentist, a vet and a driving school, people live there, because nobody on holiday needs any of them. We count places like these, along with the bakeries, grocers and cafés people use every week, in every neighbourhood near the sights, using OpenStreetMap. Then we point you to the ones where everyday life still outweighs the hotels and souvenir shops.

This isn't about saving money, and it isn't about skipping the sights. Walk to the cathedral. Then come back to a street where the café knows its regulars, and for a week, be one of them.

When you've been, tell us what you found. The map is where we start. What visitors report back is how we know we got it right.

Siamack Salari, editor

Pick a city

About One Street Back

One Street Back shows you the neighbourhoods near a city's sights where daily life still belongs to the people who live there, measured from OpenStreetMap with no paid placement. Use it to choose where to stay, or once you've arrived, to find the nearest lived-in streets for dinner, a morning coffee or a market. Why we built it →

How places get here

For each city we take every named neighbourhood within reach of the main sights and measure what is around it on the open map: bakeries, grocers, cafés, markets and everything else people buy each week, within a ten-minute walk. We compare that with what visitors use: hotels, souvenir shops, and the well-known sights and museums.

Neighbourhoods where visitors outweigh everyday life leave the list. Those getting close go on Watch, and so does anywhere a five-minute walk from the main sights. One street back means close: to be recommended, a place must be within 15 minutes of the main sights, on foot or by one short ride, and must have some life in the evening: at least two bars, or two places open at 11pm on a Friday. The rest are ranked: fewest visitors first, then the most everyday life. There is no AI step and no paid placement. Every number comes from OpenStreetMap, rebuilt every month.

The map is not the street. If you have been to one of these places, tell us what you saw. Your report is how a place goes from data to confirmed.

Street View links open on each neighbourhood's busiest shopping street, which shows you one street, not the whole neighbourhood. Google's photos can be several years old, so a shop you see may have closed. Where Google has no street photos, as in parts of Marrakech's medina, Kyoto's back lanes and Cusco, the link opens an ordinary map.

Siamack Salari

Method and editing by Siamack Salari, ethnographer, co-founder of EverydayLives & Food with Varinder

Privacy

This page sets no cookies, runs no advertising, and loads the fonts and our own photos from this site. We keep our own simple visit log: which pages, cities and links are opened, the country and town you are browsing from and the kind of device, worked out from your internet address, which we don't store. Each visitor gets a code that changes every day, so we can count visits and see what was looked at without knowing who you are or linking one day to the next. We keep the log for 90 days, use it only to improve our sites (our legitimate interest) and share it with no one. Neighbourhood photos come from Wikimedia Commons, which receives your IP address when your browser loads them, as with any website.

The “Find a place to stay” and map links open other companies' websites (Google Maps and OpenStreetMap), with the neighbourhood and city in the link.

If you tell us where you're already staying: “Use my location” works it out in your browser and never sends it to us. A typed hotel or street goes through our server to OpenStreetMap's address search, which returns its position; we don't log or keep what you typed. The “Walk there” link opens Google Maps with your starting point and the neighbourhood in it.

If you send a report or ask us to cover a city, we receive what you typed and, if you gave it, your email address. We use it only to improve One Street Back and to reply to you. We don't add you to a mailing list or share it with anyone. We keep it for up to two years; email us to have yours deleted sooner. Like any website, our host (Cloudflare) keeps standard server logs for security.

One Street Back is run by Everydaylives SRL, Belgium. Questions about your data: siamack@everydaylives.com.