Shane MacGowan Childhood Home

Shane MacGowan grew up here, in a flat at Boyne House on a leafy street in Tunbridge Wells. He was born on Christmas Day 1957 in Pembury, just up the road, and raised in Kent by his Irish parents. But the real formative place was Tipperary — every summer the family went back to the homestead, and that's where MacGowan picked up the songs, the stories, and the sense of Irishness that would power The Pogues.

He went to Holmewood House prep school in Langton Green, got bored, got perfect grades anyway, and won a scholarship to Westminster. Got thrown out for drugs. Then it was squats, punk gigs, and eventually Pogue Mahone playing to twenty people in King's Cross pubs. The whole time, that pull between Tunbridge Wells and Tipperary — between where he lived and where he felt he belonged — was the engine. You can hear it in every Pogues record, from "Dark Streets of London" to "Fairytale of New York."

Boyne House is private — just look from the street. Boyne Park is a quiet road in the middle of Tunbridge Wells, a couple of minutes' walk from the town centre. MacGowan later drank at the Sussex Arms nearby, which now has a blue plaque for him. Between this, the Sussex Arms, and Holmewood House you've got his whole Tunbridge Wells story.