Eric Clapton Childhood Home — Ripley, Surrey

Eric Clapton grew up in Ripley, a village on the Surrey hills south of London, raised by his grandparents after his teenage mother gave him up. The village — its pub, its green, its English rural quiet — is the improbable birthplace of one of rock's great guitarists. Clapton discovered the blues through records in his early teens and became consumed by it: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Freddie King, and B.B. King were his curriculum, and he absorbed their techniques with an obsessive dedication that made him technically extraordinary by his late teens. He left art school to play full-time with the Yardbirds at 18.

Clapton's trajectory through the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, and finally his solo career is one of the great narratives of British rock. 'Clapton is God' graffiti appeared on London walls during his Bluesbreakers period in 1965 — the public recognition of something the musicians around him already knew. Layla, recorded with Derek and the Dominos in 1970 as a declaration of impossible love for Pattie Boyd (then married to George Harrison), is his masterpiece.

Ripley village is a pleasant Surrey settlement with a pub, a green, and no formal Clapton museum, though locals are aware of the connection. It is accessible by road from Guildford. The Yardbirds' circuit of Richmond and southwest London clubs — the Crawdaddy at the Station Hotel in Richmond, the Marquee — is the geography of Clapton's early career.