Beatles landmarks

Saving the Beatles

On the eve of what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday on 9 October 2020, SAVE Britain’s Heritage called on Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden to issue ‘a group listing protecting all significant Beatles landmarks in Liverpool’. SAVE’s press release went on to enumerate the threatened sites, including the city’s Cavern Club, which claims to be the cradle of British pop music, and which is currently closed and facing an uncertain future – like all live music venues across the UK. The TSB Bank branch on Penny Lane (whose manager famously, according to Sir Paul McCartney’s 1967 song lyrics, ‘never wears a mac in the pouring rain – very strange’) has just closed. Opposite the Penny Lane Bank stands the former tram ‘shelter in the middle of the roundabout’, where McCartney wrote about the ‘pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray’. It lies empty and forlorn, as does the art deco Abbey Cinema in Wavertree – one of the ‘places I remember’ in John Lennon’s song ‘In My Life’. Converted into a supermarket in 1979, it faces the threat of demolition – although the Cinema Theatre Association and the Twentieth Century Society have called for it to be listed, and a petition in support has gained 4,000 names.

SAVE has form when it comes to campaigning for Beatles-related heritage. For ten years, it fought an ultimately successful battle to prevent the demolition of Ringo Starr’s birthplace at 9 Madryn Street. The humble terraced row house in Toxteth was one of 400 homes that Liverpool council had emptied and condemned to the bulldozer in the Victorian ‘Welsh Streets’, but which are now enjoying a high-quality renovation. SAVE also campaigned for the listing of the birthplaces and childhood homes of all four Beatles. They were successful in the case of the houses of John Lennon and Paul McCartney at 251 Menlove Avenue and 20 Forthlin Road respectively, which are now in the care of the National Trust (see CA 328 and 347), but the then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt turned down SAVE’s application to list the birthplaces of Ringo Starr and George Harrison on the grounds that the houses ‘have no link with the Beatles’ success’.

Heritage significance has been defined as being located in ‘architectural, historical, evidential, associative, and community value’, and it is good that an organisation like SAVE places such a high value on the latter two in the case of the Beatles – even if one could debate their assertion that ‘the Beatles are probably the most powerful British cultural phenomenon of the 20th century’.