Shane MacGowan's birthplace — Pembury, Kent

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, 1957, at Pembury Hospital in the Kent village of Pembury, a few miles east of Tunbridge Wells. His mother Therese was from County Tipperary; his father Maurice was from County Offaly. They had emigrated to England in the way that hundreds of thousands of Irish people had emigrated to England in the post-war decades — for work, for wages, for the particular version of the future that England seemed to offer. Shane was born in Kent but he was Irish. These were not, in his mind or his family's, in any tension.

The shape of his childhood was a specific kind of Irish immigrant experience: the family in London for most of the year, the return to Tipperary in the summers, the immersion in a rural western Ireland that felt like the real world even when the rest of the year was spent in Hammersmith. His mother sang Irish traditional songs. His aunt gave him whiskey as a child. The Tipperary side of the family treated him as belonging to the place in a way that an English childhood could not fully explain. He later said that his dual formation — the grime and noise of London, the fields and music of Tipperary — was the only education he needed.

Born on Christmas Day, in a Kent hospital his family had no other connection to, to Irish parents who would raise him between two countries and two traditions: the biographical origin of one of the great lyricists in the English language is almost comically on the nose in its symbolism. Pembury has no marker for him. There is no reason it would.