Traffic — Berkshire Cottage, England

In 1967, Steve Winwood, Dave Mason, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood — the band Traffic — retreated to a remote cottage in the Berkshire countryside to write and rehearse what would become their debut album. The "getting it together in the country" approach, as it became known, was partly a reaction to the commercial pop world Winwood had left behind when he quit the Spencer Davis Group, and partly a genuine attempt to find a different creative environment away from London's distractions. The cottage in Aston Tirrold provided space, quiet, and the kind of communal living arrangement that the band's music — loose, jazz-influenced, incorporating folk and psychedelic elements — seemed to require.

Traffic's debut album "Mr. Fantasy" (1967) and its follow-up "Traffic" (1968) produced some of the most distinctive records of the British psychedelic era: "Paper Sun," "Hole in My Shoe," "Dear Mr. Fantasy," "Feelin' Alright" (later covered definitively by Joe Cocker). Winwood's voice — one of the most extraordinary in British music, a blue-eyed soul instrument of uncommon depth — was the band's most distinctive feature, but the interplay between the four musicians, and particularly the instrumental explorations they developed in the cottage environment, gave the music its character.

The Berkshire countryside cottage is a private property and not formally identified as a heritage site, but it is documented in Traffic biographies and in Winwood's interviews. The "cottage" approach to creative retreat — musicians removing themselves from urban commercial pressure to make music in a rural environment — became a model for subsequent bands. Winwood has continued performing and recording across more than fifty years, and Traffic's recorded legacy has proved durably influential.