To a dour Brummie like me, living in Liverpool is an unending source of hope and delight. I took this photo to remind me
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Once a place is immortalised in song it’s hard to imagine it as somewhere in which people really do walk their dogs, or go to the Londis or get a haircut. When it’s the Beatles doing the immortalising, it becomes almost impossible – unless, of course, you live there.
Penny Lane, in Mossley Hill, south Liverpool, lives on not just as a Beatles song but as a street five minutes’ walk from my house. John Lennon and George Harrison went to the primary school on the corner, and Paul McCartney was a choirboy at the church opposite the song’s “shelter in the middle of a roundabout”, where this photo was taken. (Mossley Hill was a bit too posh for Ringo, who has his own mural in Toxteth.)
Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide
