20 Forthlin Road — Paul McCartney's childhood home

20 Forthlin Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton is the terraced council house where Paul McCartney grew up from 1955, after his mother Mary died of breast cancer and his father Jim moved the family there. It is a modest, grey-pebbledashed mid-terrace on a quiet residential street — the kind of house that several hundred thousand families in post-war Britain lived in, indistinguishable in its exterior from the houses on either side. What distinguishes it is that Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote some of the most successful songs in the history of popular music in the downstairs front room, skipping school to do it.

Lennon would come to Forthlin Road because McCartney's father Jim, a jazz musician, approved of the visits and because the house offered the piano and the space to work. The two of them sat facing each other, guitars across their laps, and wrote. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership that produced the Beatles' catalogue began here, in the front room of a Liverpool council house, during the years when both of them were teenagers with no particular reason to believe it would amount to anything beyond local interest.

The house is now owned by the National Trust — as is Lennon's childhood home at 251 Menlove Avenue — and is open for tours by minibus from the Albert Dock. The National Trust has restored the interior to its 1950s appearance with period furniture, appliances, and photographs. Visiting requires booking in advance; the tours run multiple times daily during the summer season. Standing in the front room looking at the two chairs where the most successful songwriting partnership in popular music history worked out its early material is an experience that the house's ordinariness makes more rather than less affecting.