SEX Shop — 430 King's Road, London

The boutique at 430 King's Road in Chelsea — known variously as Let It Rock, Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, SEX, and Seditionaries, depending on the era — was Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop and the physical birthplace of the British punk aesthetic. When McLaren renamed it SEX in 1974 and began selling rubber, leather, and confrontational sloganed T-shirts, it became a gathering point for a loose network of dissatisfied young people who would coalesce into the punk movement. The Sex Pistols were assembled largely from the shop's orbit: John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock were all regulars or employees.

McLaren managed the Pistols from 1975 onward with an impresario's instinct for provocation — the Bill Grundy interview, the "God Save the Queen" single timed to the Queen's Silver Jubilee, the Anarchy in the UK tour — and the shop remained the ideological and aesthetic headquarters of the operation. Westwood's clothing designs, which incorporated safety pins, bondage trousers, and distressed fabrics, translated the Pistols' confrontational energy into fashion and proved to be the more durable commercial legacy: Westwood went on to become one of Britain's most celebrated designers.

The building at 430 King's Road still stands. It has housed various businesses since Seditionaries closed, and the facade has been altered, but it is a regular stop on punk heritage tours of London. A blue plaque acknowledges its significance. The World's End neighbourhood retains something of its 1970s bohemian character, and King's Road itself is thick with the ghosts of multiple decades of London subculture.