Trench Town — Kingston, Jamaica

Trench Town — a government housing scheme in West Kingston built in the 1940s and 1950s — is the neighbourhood where reggae music was born. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Toots Hibbert, Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, and dozens of the foundational figures of ska, rocksteady, and reggae grew up here or lived here during the formative years of Jamaican popular music. The community's 6 Lower First Street — where Marley lived with his mother and where Bunny Wailer's father, Toddy Livingston, housed a rotating cast of young musicians — was one of the most musically fertile addresses in the world in the early 1960s.

Marley's song "Trench Town" and Peter Tosh's "Trench Town Rock" are explicit celebrations of the neighbourhood's culture — its communal creativity, its poverty, its violence, and its music. The yard culture of Trench Town, where sound systems competed and musicians gathered, was the incubator for a music that would eventually circle the globe. Clement Dodd's Studio One on Brentford Road — where many of the early Wailers recordings were made — is closely associated with the Trench Town scene.

Trench Town remains a working-class community with significant social challenges, and visitors should approach with awareness and ideally with a local guide. The Trench Town Culture Yard at 6 Lower First Street — on the site of the house Marley once occupied — has been developed as a heritage site and museum open to visitors. The yard contains personal effects, photographs, and a replica of the room where Marley lived as a young man. It is one of reggae music's most significant pilgrimage destinations.