125 Hyndford Street — Van Morrison's Belfast Childhood Home

125 Hyndford Street in East Belfast is where George Ivan Morrison — Van Morrison — was born on 31 August 1945 and grew up. The terraced house in a Protestant working-class neighbourhood gave its name to one of his most celebrated songs: 'On Hyndford Street' from the 1991 album Hymns to the Silence, in which he evokes in extraordinary detail the sounds and sensations of his childhood — 'down in the hollow, playing a brand new game, laughing and a-running, hey, hey, skipping and a-jumping'. The street and its surroundings — the River Beechie, Cyprus Avenue, Orangefield — became the recurring geography of his inner world.

Morrison's father George was a collector of American jazz and blues records, and the house at Hyndford Street was filled with the sounds of Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, and Mahalia Jackson. These records were the foundation of Van Morrison's musical education and established the bedrock of what would become a uniquely syncretic style — Celtic soul, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, and mystical introspection woven into something entirely his own. He heard the music before he had words for it, and the music of East Belfast is the music that runs through everything he later made.

The house at 125 Hyndford Street is a private residence. The surrounding streets of East Belfast — Cyprus Avenue (the setting for another celebrated Morrison song), the Orangefield area, and nearby Beechie River — are documented in Belfast heritage walks. The East Belfast landscape of Morrison's childhood has been substantially altered over the decades, but the street itself remains much as it was and is visited by fans making the pilgrimage to the source of one of the most distinctive voices in the history of popular music.