125 Hyndford Street — Van Morrison's childhood home

George Ivan Morrison was born on August 31, 1945, and grew up at 125 Hyndford Street in Bloomfield, a working-class area of East Belfast. The house is a red-brick terrace, indistinguishable from its neighbours, on a street that runs off the Beersbridge Road about a mile from the city centre. His father George Morrison was an electrician at the Harland and Wolff shipyard who had assembled one of the more extraordinary private record collections in Belfast: Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers. Before Van Morrison had played a note himself, he had absorbed a musical education that most musicians spend their careers trying to construct.

The house on Hyndford Street has become one of the most specific coordinates in Van Morrison's mythology, partly because he named it directly. "On Hyndford Street" — from the 1991 double album Hymns to the Silence — is a long, incantatory meditation on the sensory experience of that childhood: the foghorns on the lough, the smell of the neighbour's chimney, the sound of his mother singing in the kitchen, the quality of light on a particular kind of Belfast evening. It is one of the most deeply felt pieces of music he ever made, and it is essentially an address: a man in his mid-forties locating the exact coordinates of the moment before everything else happened.

The house is a private residence and there is no official marker on the exterior. Fans make the pilgrimage regardless. East Belfast has produced a remarkable density of musical talent for a relatively small area — Hyndford Street is within walking distance of Cyprus Avenue — and the neighbourhood's particular combination of industrial working-class life and natural proximity to the lough and the hills informs Morrison's music in ways that are not always visible in the lyrics but are always audible in the sound.