14 Lodge Road — Ozzy Osbourne's Childhood Home, Aston

Ozzy Osbourne — John Michael Osbourne — was born on 3 December 1948 and grew up at 14 Lodge Road in the Aston district of Birmingham. The house was a small terraced property in a working-class neighbourhood, shared by a family of six children, and the conditions of Osbourne's childhood — poverty, a noisy overcrowded house, early school-leaving, a series of menial jobs — are the material conditions from which Black Sabbath's music emerged. Aston in the post-war decades was an industrial Birmingham suburb defined by the Austin car works, back-to-back housing, and the ambient noise of heavy manufacturing, and the music Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Osbourne made together carried that industrial weight into the structure of the riffs themselves.

The four members of Black Sabbath all grew up within a short distance of each other in Aston and the surrounding areas. Tony Iommi, who lost the tips of two fingers in a sheet metal factory accident at age seventeen and developed the guitar technique — lighter strings, lower tuning, thick rubber thimbles — that became the sonic signature of heavy metal, grew up a short walk from Lodge Road. Geezer Butler, who wrote most of the band's lyrics from an interest in occultism, science fiction, and social criticism, was from the same community. The band formed as Earth and played their first shows in the Birmingham area before adopting the Black Sabbath name in 1969.

The Lodge Road house is a private residential property in a part of Aston that has changed significantly since Osbourne's childhood. Birmingham has honoured Black Sabbath with considerable civic recognition: the Black Sabbath Bridge over the canal on Broad Street, the Black Sabbath Bench sculpture in the city centre, and Ozzy Osbourne's star on the Birmingham Walk of Stars. Osbourne's own autobiography, 'I Am Ozzy,' provides a detailed and frequently very funny account of his childhood at Lodge Road and the path from Aston to global rock stardom.