During a trip to London in June 2022 (actual date June 18 - Paul’s 80th birthday) I took a Beatles themed walking tour via London Walks. They have two different tours which visit various Beatles-related sites in London.
This particular tour commenced at the Marylebone rail station, which featured in the opening scenes of the Beatles' first feature film, A Hard Day's Night.
Facade of Marylebone Station
The area we were directed to was the canopy shading the entrance. It has not changed much since 1964, if at all.
The next photo is a time warp back to 1964, of George running beneath the canopy in the movie, trying to escape from over-enthusiastic fans.
Run, George! Run!
The next stop was nearby, at Marylebone Town Hall. There weren't any films made here, but it is where Paul married his first and third wives, Linda and Nancy, and Ringo married his second wife, Barbara.
Time warp photo is of Paul and Linda trying to leave the Town Hall after they were married, March 12, 1969.
A Beatle wedding, especially the wedding of the last remaining single Beatle, was a big deal. There's no way Paul and Linda had this many people invited to their wedding. (It's possible to make out Paul's brother, Mike, just above Paul, and Mal Evans, the Beatles' roadie and assistant, who is the big guy behind Linda.)
None of the other Beatles attended Paul's wedding. I know a lot is made of how they were fracturing apart by 1969. In fact, just six months later John would announce to the others that he wanted “a divorce.” At the time Paul and Linda decided they were going to get hitched (and they made that decision pretty much at the last minute, although Linda was about four months pregnant with their daughter Mary), Ringo was off making the film The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers, and John was running around the world with Yoko looking for someplace that would allow them to get married without a waiting period (their respective divorces had recently been finalized, and due to the fact that Yoko was a Japanese citizen, they couldn't just have a quickie marriage at home. Not sure how Paul and Linda pulled it off, as Linda wasn’t British either.) George, according to the tour guide, was supposed to attend. Before the event he stopped by the Beatles' Apple Corps offices, and while he was there his wife Pattie called and told him their home was being raided by the drug squad.
(This was the infamous raid in which George told the police, who confronted him with marijuana they said they had found inside a shoe, that he would never keep his marijuana in his shoe because he had a special place to keep it. The police at the time were so into busting popular music stars that they would actually plant the stuff while raiding their homes.)
So George had to hot foot it back to suburbia to get charged with possession, but he apparently did make it to the reception.
34 Montagu Square
Back in the 1960s, the ground floor and basement flat of this house (the one behind the car)
were rented by Ringo Starr. Ringo apparently was fine with Paul setting up some recording equipment in the basement flat, and he would record some demo songs there. It's also where he worked on "Eleanor Rigby" with a little help from his friends.
After John left his suburban mansion to hook up with Yoko, they lived in Ringo's flat for about three months. Therefore, there is an English Heritage blue plaque commemorating him on this building.
It's a bit ironic that John is up here when Ringo is the one who rented the flat, but Ringo's still with us, and only deceased persons are entitled to a blue plaque from English Heritage.
John and Yoko were in this flat when the fully nude photos that became the cover of their album Two Virgins were taken. I'm not including a time warp photo of this event.
In October 1968 John and Yoko were arrested for drug possession here, by the same squad that would bust George on the day of Paul’s wedding the next year. They had been tipped off by a journalist friend, so had cleaned the flat of drugs (John would later say he thought they were being extra careful because Jimi Hendrix had just been there, see below). But John had forgotten about some furniture and other items he had moved in from his previous house, and two drug-sniffing dogs called Yogi and Boo-boo found a small amount of hashish and some cannabis residue, mostly inside a binoculars case.
John being arrested at 34 Montagu Square
John and Yoko were taken down to the police station and charged, then ordered to appear in court the following day, where John pleaded guilty to drug possession in exchange for dropping Yoko’s charges. No one thought to send a car for them after their appearance, so they got mobbed by journalists and fans. Only a few days earlier, an announcement had been made that Yoko was pregnant, which caused a major stir because both she and John were still married to other people. They subsequently left Montagu Square and went to stay at Paul’s house.
Yoko miscarried her pregnancy the next month. In the future, John’s conviction would be used by those trying to deport him from the United States after he and Yoko relocated to New York City.
Ringo had other illustrious guests in his flat; for a time he sublet it to Jimi Hendrix, who took some LSD one day and decided to trash all of Ringo’s furniture and paint over his fancy wallpaper. Ringo understandably had a fit and evicted Jimi.
57 Wimpole Street
Now, it's a private clinic, but in the 60s this was the home of the Asher family: Dr. Richard Asher, a psychiatrist, Margaret Asher, a professor of music, and their children Peter, Claire and Jane.
Jane Asher was only five years old when she began acting. By 1963 she had a successful film and television career, and was a regular on the television show Juke Box Jury, which featured celebrities reviewing the popular records of the week.
Jane, who was in the Beatles’ core demographic, accepted an assignment in April 1963 to be photographed watching the boys perform at Albert Hall. She met all four backstage, and while they were all very impressed with her, she hit it off with Paul. They were a serious couple for the next five years.
In 1963 the Beatles were living in an apartment in London that Brian Epstein had rented for all of them. John, the married one, had already moved out. Now the Ashers offered to let Paul live at their place. They gave him his own attic room, and their son Peter had the one next door. Eventually they even had a piano moved up there for Paul. Apparently Paul thought this arrangement was fab, except for the fans who figured out where he was staying and camped out on the street waiting for him. He used to climb out the attic and over into the next-door neighbor's window (with their permission), go down to the basement flat of the next house (also with permission) and go out another back door to avoid the fans.
Hell, I’d let Paul climb through the window and walk through my flat anytime.
The upper right window is Paul's attic room.
Paul thought a great deal of the Asher family; he lived with them for more than two years. He wrote a song, “World Without Love,” that became a number one hit for Peter (Asher) and Gordon. Mrs. Asher tried to teach him to read music, and he never learned that, but he did learn to play the recorder - which he plays in "Fool on the Hill." Mrs. Asher’s music room is where Paul and John wrote “I Want to Hold Your Hand” together.
One morning Paul woke up in his attic bedroom with a melody in his head. He had a piano right there in his room, so he got up and started playing it so he wouldn’t forget it. He didn’t have lyrics for it so he called it “Scrambled Eggs,” maybe he was thinking about breakfast at the time. He spent a long time trying to figure out if he was subconsciously remembering someone else’s tune, and when no one else could place it, he finally gave it lyrics and named it “Yesterday.” 
Paul’s piano from the Asher house is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In 1965 Paul bought his own house in Cavendish Avenue, very close to the studios on Abbey Road. In 1969, some time after Paul and Jane were no longer an item, Dr. Asher committed suicide in the Wimpole Street house and the family understandably sold it.
363 Oxford Street
In 2022, this is what 363 Oxford Street looked like. But in the 1960s it looked like this:
This was the premier record shop in London. I understand that Candy World has met its demise and, once again, it’s now a HMV store.
In 1962, a guy from Liverpool named Brian Epstein was desperately trying to score a recording contract for the group he managed, four young, scrappy and hungry lads called the Beatles: John, Paul, George, and…Pete. They’d already auditioned for Decca Records, and been rejected. Armed with the Decca audition tapes, Brian made the rounds in London, but he wasn’t having much luck. Groups of young men with guitars performing rock n’ roll covers were a dime a dozen.
HMV was then part of EMI, the staid British recorded music conglomerate that had already turned Brian’s boys down. The store had everything, even a small recording studio that could be used by members of the public as a novelty. Brian, thinking it might be a good idea to have some acetate disks that he could drop off while schmoozing prospective producers, brought his reel to reel audition tapes around to have a few records made. The guy cutting the discs was named Jim Foy, and he rather liked what he heard. So he went down the hall and got music publisher Sid Colman to have a listen (as a publisher, Colman was particularly interested in the fact that the group had written a couple of their songs themselves). Colman, in turn, knew a guy with EMI subsidiary Parlophone Records, generally restricted to producing comedy and classical albums, who was trying to get with the times and looking for a pop group to record. His name was George Martin. Colman set George up with Brian. And so it goes.
94 Baker Street
This nondescript building was once, for a few short months in 1967-68, the Apple Boutique. It was part of the Beatles’ attempt to branch out in business. They weren’t very good at it.
Our lads thought a groovy place to sell mod clothes would be a brilliant idea. By ‘67, they and their wives and girlfriends and all of their pals were well into the popular fashions of the day. So they set it up, not in a fashionable area like Carnaby Street, but in the heart of sticks-up-their-butts London. And they had it painted like this:
Which really endeared them to the neighbors. Not.
When you see the boys wearing their coolest threads in the summer of love, this is probably where they picked up their wardrobes - from the stock they were supposed to be selling. When the store opened, the first 50 guests received a free Apple money clip, of all things. Managed by John’s childhood best friend Pete Shotton and George’s sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, the place lasted only seven months, because the customers (and the staff members, and the owners) were inclined to just help themselves to the merchandise without paying for it. And then Westminster City Council made them paint over the mural, which the boys didn’t have permission to put there in the first place.
The store closed in July 1968 after losing a boatload of money. Instead of liquidating the remaining stock, the Beatles gave it away, emptying the place out within hours (but not before taking all the stuff they liked first.)
 |
| Another blue plaque. |
As major a failure as the Apple Boutique was, its current location has a blue plaque for the Beatles, stating they “worked here.” It originally named only John, but a new one was added with George after he passed. I’m assuming Ringo and Paul will get their own plaque right next to John and George someday, since they all “worked” here.
As with most London Beatles-related tours, this one ended at Abbey Road Studios, but that very important location will be covered in depth with another entry.
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