Black Sabbath's First Rehearsal — Newtown Community Centre, Aston

In a modest room inside the Newtown Community Centre on New Town Row in the Six Ways district of Aston, Birmingham, the band then known as Earth — soon to become Black Sabbath — are thought to have held some of their earliest rehearsals in 1968 and 1969. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward all grew up within a few streets of one another in this working-class corner of the city, and the community centre's rooms gave them somewhere cheap and accessible to make noise. According to accounts from the era, the sessions were loud enough to compete with the traffic from the A34 tunnel running beneath the area.

It was reportedly during these early rehearsals that Iommi began developing the slow, heavy, drop-tuned guitar style that would come to define heavy metal — a technique partly born of necessity. Two years earlier, on his last day at a sheet metal factory, Iommi had lost the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand; to reduce string tension and make playing bearable, he tuned his guitar down and used a lighter touch. The detuned, sludgy sound that resulted would become heavy metal's foundational sonic vocabulary, and the first stirrings of it are said to have echoed around these walls.

The Newtown Community Centre closed its doors permanently on 5 October 2019 after decades of serving its local community. The building still stands at the Six Ways junction, but it is no longer in use. For many metal pilgrims who make the journey to Birmingham, this corner of Aston — unremarkable in every outward respect — is considered hallowed ground: the unassuming origin point of one of the heaviest bands in history.