Lighthouses

	John Lennon's Home, Mendips, Menlove Avenue, Woolton Beneath the blue suburban skies ... This was Lennon's Aunt Mimi's house, 251 Menlove Avenue, and his home from 1945 to 1963. It was bought for the National Trust by Yoko Ono and lovingly restored to an authentic 1950s condition, with period artefacts and Lennon memorabilia. Anyone who lived through the 1950s will find the time-warp eerily effective and Lennon's presence is palpable.
	Paul McCartney's Home, 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton This modest terraced house was the home of Paul McCartney and his brother Mike from 1955 and is where the Beatles met, rehearsed and wrote many of their earliest songs. The interior has been reconstructed in an authentic 1950s style and is so small that you wonder how they ever got a drum kit inside. There are plenty of early Beatles memorabilia including family photographs by Mike McCartney. Comparison of this house with Mendips, where John Lennon was brought up, is intriguing. Paul, often labelled a 'social climber' was evidently raised in a more working class family environment than the middle class, self-styled 'working class hero', John. Both would seem to have felt a need to distance themselves from their origins.
	Quarry Bank, Allerton The gothic Quarry Bank was built in 1866-7 for timber merchant James Bland. It became Quarry Bank School, the alma mater of John Lennon. While at Quarry Bank, John developed a well-earned reputation as a troublemaker with subversive artistic talents and formed The Quarrymen, his first group.
	St. Peter's Church, Woolton The present grand sandstone church, one of Liverpool's largest parish churches, was completed in 1887. The nearby church hall was the place where John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at a fateful fête on July 6th 1957.
	St. Peter's Churchyard, Woolton The resting place of Eleanor Rigby, posthumously, though coincidentally, famous thanks to the exquisite Paul McCartney song. Although the graveyard must have been familiar to him at that time, McCartney claims that the name came to him from other sources : Eleanor Bron, who co-starred in the film Help and Rigby from a shop in Bristol that he noticed when visiting his then girl-friend Jane Asher.
	Strawberry Field Let me take you down ... The gateway to Strawberry Field, the Salvation Army children's home on Beaconsfield Road, immortalised in Lennon's song (the best song ever written, according to some) and now an object of pilgrimage for Beatles tourists from all over the world.
	The Grapes Situated in Matthew Street in the Cavern Quarter, the Beatles centre of the universe with it's reconstructed Cavern Club and autumn bank holiday festival, the Grapes was a haunt of the Beatles in their early days and the evidence is there: a little known photo of the four of them drinking in the pub with wall paper in the background, a scrap of which is still preserved.
	Ye Cracke A characterful pub and a pub full of characters, at least it used to be when it was the haunt of John Lennon, the Art School crowd and the Liverpool Poets. Unusual art work includes a large garish painting of a battle scene done in a primitive style, but what I'm sure I remember as being an abstract painting by the 'Fifth Beatle', Stuart Sutcliffe, is no longer there - probably too valuable nowadays.