John Lennon childhood house (age 5 to 22)

Mendips at 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton is the suburban semi-detached house where John Lennon lived from age five until he left for art college and then Hamburg in the late 1950s -- the formative years during which he formed The Quarrymen, taught himself guitar, met Paul McCartney, and began the chain of events that led to The Beatles. He lived here with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George after his mother Julia and his father Alf were both judged unable to care for him. Mimi was strict, orderly, and unsentimental; she famously told the teenage Lennon that his guitar was all very well but he would never make a living at it.

The house is a solidly middle-class 1930s semi in a quiet residential street, surrounded by a privet hedge that Mimi tended obsessively. Lennon practised guitar in the porch -- Mimi would not allow it in the house. Paul McCartney came here often in the late 1950s, and the two of them wrote songs in the small front room. Julia, Lennon's mother, was knocked down and killed by a car on Menlove Avenue in July 1958, close to the house; the grief of that loss runs through many of his later songs.

Mendips was purchased by Yoko Ono in 2002 and donated to the National Trust, which now opens it for guided tours. The interior has been restored to its 1950s appearance, with period furniture, wallpaper, and fittings that recreate the world Lennon grew up in. The house is managed in conjunction with 20 Forthlin Road -- Paul McCartney's childhood home nearby -- as a paired Beatles heritage experience.