Morrissey Childhood Home — King's Road, Stretford, Manchester

Steven Patrick Morrissey grew up at 384 King's Road in Stretford, a working-class suburb southwest of Manchester city centre, in a household of Irish Catholic immigrants. The Stretford childhood — its boredom, its grey terraces, its sense of provincial entrapment — is the biographical foundation for nearly everything Morrissey wrote in the Smiths. Johnny Marr came to this address in 1982 to propose forming a band; the moment is the origin point of one of British pop's greatest songwriting partnerships.

The Smiths released four studio albums between 1984 and 1987 — The Smiths, Meat Is Murder, The Queen Is Dead, and Strangeways, Here We Come — each one a crystallisation of Morrissey's literary wit and self-dramatising melancholy set against Marr's jangly, inventive guitar playing. 'This Charming Man,' 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,' 'How Soon Is Now?,' and 'The Boy with the Thorn in His Side' are among the most beloved British pop songs of the past half century. The band's abrupt end in 1987 — Marr walked out — has never been satisfactorily explained by either party.

The King's Road house in Stretford is a private residence and a well-known pilgrimage point for Smiths fans, though it is emphatically not open to the public. Stretford is accessible from Manchester city centre via the tram. The broader Manchester geography of the Smiths — the Southern Cemetery where Morrissey spent teenage afternoons, the venues of the early shows — is extensively documented in fan guides.