Jimi Hendrix apartment (1968-1969)

The apartment at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair -- the top-floor flat of a Georgian townhouse -- was home to Jimi Hendrix from July 1968 to early 1969. He and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham rented the flat for 30 pounds a week, making it the only home Hendrix ever shared with a partner. During his time at Brook Street he recorded Electric Ladyland, widely considered one of the greatest albums in rock history, a sprawling double album of psychedelic blues-rock that showed Hendrix's musical ambitions expanding beyond what a conventional studio or a conventional career could contain.

What Hendrix could not have known was that the flat directly below his had been home to George Frideric Handel from 1723 until his death in 1759. The lower floors of 23 and 25 Brook Street had been preserved as the Handel House Museum since 2001. When it became clear that Hendrix had lived directly above, the museum expanded upward and became the Handel and Hendrix in London, now celebrating both the Baroque composer and the psychedelic rock guitarist who shared the same building across two and a half centuries.

The property is open to the public as a museum, with Hendrix's flat on the top floor restored to its approximate 1968 appearance -- shag carpets, Indian fabrics, the particular aesthetic that Kathy Etchingham created and which is documented in photographs from the period. Handel's rooms below are preserved separately. The combination of the two is one of London's stranger and more delightful cultural curiosities.