I’m sure it must have been mentioned on here before but visited John and Paul’s childhood homes recently and found the experience quite moving. It helped (no pun intended) that I was on a group of genuinely interested and engaged Beatles fans – one of the guides remarked that the previous group had seemed bored.
I found it to be very tastefully done, and with a nice bit of social / historical context added by the husband (John’s home) and wife (Paul’s home) guides.
Fantastic Mike McCartney photos of ‘our kid’ on display at 20 Forthlin Road.
Only thing I would maybe change is in incorporating a brief (non-disembarking) tour of prominent landmarks on the way. For example, we went along Penny Lane but I only realised this when overhearing the driver. But I guess there are countless other tours which cater for this.
I’d done the Beatles Story museum on the Dock before and we went again. It was fine, but was stuff I was overly familiar with. The house visits though were superb and will stay with me.
We went last summer… a great day. No complaints whatsoever – both guides were top-notch and a great job has been done all round. Keeping the two houses distinct from a general Beatles tour I think is actually a good thing. I honestly think Jim and Mimi would have been thrilled with what’s happened to their houses (notwithstanding the Great Unwashed tramping around their front parlours)
I honestly think you have to be British to get the full impact of the tours, because both houses remind me of houses I’ve lived in or friends/relatives have lived in… it domesticated the Beatles in my imagination in a charming and unexpected way. God bless whoever lived in Mendips after Mimi and decided not to change anything – it’s a terrific time capsule, of interest to social historians as well as anyone HJHM minded.
“A soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust”. Think, when he wrote that the NT was an unreachable part of the Establishment… now they’re displaying copies of The Daily Howl!
Done it 3 times over about 10 years (with different people). It really is brilliant. And I learnt something new each time. For other sites the best bet could be by special taxi or on foot (Mathew St area).
The Beatles story is pretty good. I like that it is incredibly detailed up to about 1963 (when they left Liverpool), then skips relatively fast over films, breaking US, Rubber Soul, Pepper, White Album etc!!
Bravo. I dragged my wife round this for my 41st birthday and it was one of the greatest days of my Beatle-loving life. To stand in the same porch John and Paul practised in and hear the same reverberation they would have heard on their voices as they sang! To sit on Lennon’s bed! I had just finished reading the Lewisohn book at the time and soaking in the atmosphere of these places brought the story alive in a way it never had been for me before. The tour guide guy (can’t remember his name) was very entertaining as well.
And the same day I visited the Casbah club! It’s a bit of a hidden gem. You get a tour by Roag Best, son of Mona Best and Neil Aspinall. Highly recommended, if but for the fact Roag understandably has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about how much more famous the Cavern is, so feels the need to exaggerate the Casbah’s importance. (I simply do not believe there were a thousand kids on the opening night queuing round the block). As the closest I will ever probably come to speaking to a (kind of) connection to the band themselves, I fired a load of geeky fan-based questions at him and tried to get him to dish some unheard dirt. He eventually got a bit miffed and said he had to go….
Anyway, you can do both in a day and both are excellent.
We based our 10th Wedding Anniversary trip to Liverpool around visiting John and Pauls houses (as well as seeing Patty Boyd’s photos and the new Beatles Statues and staying in The Hard Days Night Hotel!).
Both the house custodians were really interesting. Sylvia at John’s House had seen the band live at the cavern back in the day and Linda at Pauls house was an original Apple Scruff and had been interviewed by Mark Lewisohn. The contrast in houses was very interesting, Pauls being the more homely and Johns being quite prim and proper. We were invited to sit on Jim Mccartney’s sofa, admire the mixture of wall paper end of roll decor and play the piano (a replica).
Linda took great delight in telling us they’d had Bob Dylan on the same tour a few weeks before, others on the tour had come off the bus saying there was a strange man sat at the back with his hood up! apparently all he was interested in was seeing Johns room.
Apparently Paul keeps trying to get into the back garden to plant a tree but keeps forgetting to tell The National Trust he’s coming so can’t get in.
I lived at the bottom of Penny Lane in the early 80s (Liverpool Uni Halls of Res are still there, I believe). My room overlooked the Penny Lane street sign, which was nicked on a regular basis so the council eventually replaced it by painting the sign on the wall. Apart from that there was very little Beatle tourism or interest in the Fab 4.
I spent my teens in north Wales. On trips to Liverpool we would always head for Probe Records, but it never occurred to us to round the corner to Mathew Street. The whole area is now branded Cavern Quarter.