source : the age
It’s Tuesday lunchtime at the most famous zebra crossing in the world. As I arrive at Abbey Road Studios in London’s affluent St John’s Wood, I count 64 people milling around the lollipop beacons that flank the street, waiting for the opportunity to recreate The Photo.
Over the next 30 minutes, I watch a whopping 49 crossings by individuals or groups mimicking John, Ringo, Paul and George’s march across the Grade II-listed black-and-white stripes. One group does it five times, getting the angles of their legs exactly right. To be fair, it might have been more than 49 crossings, but a 20-person Beatles walking tour turns up and obscures my view. “God help the neighbours,” an Irish passer-by smirks.
The Beatles’ original photograph, of course, found fame as the sleeve of their Abbey Road album in 1969. And in the 57 years since, the crossing has become a magnet for Fab Four nuts, curious tourists and Instagram poseurs.
Last month, it was graced by the closest things we’ll get to all four Beatles when the cast of Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-film band biopic recreated the walk for the silver screen. Actor Harris Dickinson led the quartet as a bearded Lennon in his white suit, followed by Barry Keoghan as Starr, Paul Mescal as a bare-footed McCartney and Joseph Quinn as Harrison. Interest in this stretch of tarmac in NW8 will only grow when the films come out in 2028.
Under mid-August skies, chaos reigns. Cars beep, buses halt and cyclists pull up. “There are too many people. Sometimes you wait for five or 10 minutes,” says Dan, a regular driver in the area. One resident, who asks not to be named, tells me that “it’s not uncommon to see people literally in the middle of the road with a tripod to get the shot as you approach the zebra crossing.” Resident Lisa Carey, out walking her dog, Gerty, says the street was “completely blocked off for two days” during the recent filming.
Meanwhile, a strolling local in a Rolling Stones T-shirt pulls a face when I gesture towards the Abbey Road crossing. “That’s a very posh area,” she scoffs, displaying a gritty partisanship that Keith Richards would be proud of.
Bus drivers – talking when their vehicles are safely static at nearby bus stops – are both vigilant and resigned. “Most of the time, we wait,” says a driver taking me north up Abbey Road.
As we approach the studio, a man in a yellow polo shirt blocks the road between the bus and the crossing, directing four companions across, snapping away with his iPhone. Job done, he waves the bus through, a quasi-traffic warden. A second bus driver, taking me back south, says: “It’s hard because you don’t know who’s going over the crossing. You have to stop and check it out.”
Lisa Markwell uses the road daily. “It’s completely bonkers. And it’s all day, every day. I go down it every morning and I come back every afternoon and sometimes at the weekend, and they’re always there,” she says.
If Markwell is on her Vespa scooter, she’ll sometimes alert visitors if they’re at the wrong zebra crossing (there are two) or taking the picture from the wrong direction (the album photo looks south to north). “I save them the pain of getting home and realising that they’ve taken the wrong picture,” she says, adding that her husband will subtly photobomb with hand gestures or facial expressions.
As my bus experience attests, it’s actually the people taking the photos who are most at risk. “It’s really dangerous,” says Markwell. “Because buses go up there, there are loads of delivery vans and hundreds of scooters. And the [photographers] are completely mad, they’ve got their back to the traffic, they’re right in the middle, and there’s a bit of a corner [from Grove End Road into Abbey Road].” Back in 2017, one TripAdvisor user even wrote that “someone is going to get killed … Dead tourists won’t be very attractive.”
Caroline Sargent, a councillor in the Abbey Road ward, says that there have been “very few complaints” about the crossing in recent years. The road has the mandatory 20 miles per hour (30 kilometres per hour) speed limit. Still, Sargent says that visitors are “sometimes surprised to see that it’s an active pedestrian crossing at the junction of busy mains roads running through a very residential neighbourhood”. She adds that “local people driving do get frustrated, especially at school pick-up times, if they have to wait for tourists to recreate the iconic scene.”
But a new menace has emerged. “The more recent concerns have been scammers and thieves posing as police or security targeting unwitting tourists with ID checks then taking cash from their wallets,” says Sargent. This occurs “periodically” and the council “asked local police to step up patrols, which has resulted in arrests, plus we installed more CCTV”.
There’s far more harmony among the tourists themselves. Diane Cole, visiting from South Carolina in the US, is sitting on a wall, watching the Beatles pilgrims wear down their rubber soles. “I thought there would be more people. I also thought it would be a bigger area. But this is neat, just watching. I posted on Facebook five minutes ago and I’ve already had a tonne of likes,” she says. Her husband Steve, “a major music fan”, says the couple also recently visited Van Morrison’s home in Belfast.
But you don’t even have to be present to join in the fun. Since around 2010, a “Crossing Cam” outside the studio has streamed live crossings on the internet, meaning fans can watch from anywhere in the world. The studio’s website has a “Crossing Hall of Fame” section, displaying the most Beatles-like walks. In 2018, the livestream even caught McCartney himself strolling across the road, ahead of an intimate gig at Abbey Road Studios for his album Egypt Station.
Then I meet the ultra-cool Quinn LeBlanc, a 23-year-old folk musician from Canada, who’s over here to play festivals (he also starred in last year’s Amazon Prime series We Were Liars, IMDB tells me). LeBlanc strolls across the zebra stripes, cigarette in mouth. There’s not even anyone taking a picture. “I’ve always had an appreciation for this kind of thing. But I don’t need a photo. I don’t have a Facebook to put it on,” he says.
Jeff Turner, who runs the charming St John’s Wood Collectables shop around the corner, says that Diane Cole is right and that, unbelievably, there used to be even more devotees at the crossing. “At this time of year there used to be at least 300 people,” Turner says, surrounded by Beatles ephemera.
Why the decline? “Young kids probably think their music’s better,” he says with an unbelieving smile. Turner has no sympathy for irate drivers. “If they don’t like it, there are three different roads they can take. I have a theory – I think they’re angry people who like to vent.”
The litmus test for London motorists’ tolerance levels are black cab drivers. If there’s an unnecessary nuisance on any road between Ealing and East Ham, they’ll have an opinion. So I phone Steve McNamara, the general secretary of Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association. He’s remarkably relaxed. “Abbey Road has been like that for 40 years. It fluctuates with the seasons, and it’s just something else in London that you have to put up with. People come here from all over the world to do it,” he says.
“Yeah, it can be annoying at times. It can take a quarter of an hour to get across. [But] would we like to see it stopped? No, we wouldn’t. Because it’s a London history thing. It’s like saying, ‘What about when they close the road every morning outside [Buckingham] Palace for the Changing of the Guard?’
“It causes more problems but, equally, you live in London. It’s part of the fabric of the city … Sorry, if you’re looking for me to say we’ve got the hump over it, we haven’t.” Outside the green cabmen’s shelter at nearby Warwick Avenue, fellow black cab driver Nigel Vidal agrees that “it’s part of London life”.
“It’s part of the charm of St John’s Wood. Whether it’s sunny or rainy, it’s a draw. It’s like Lord’s and Regent’s Park,” says Simon Kyriacou, an estate agent at the local branch of Winkworth.
Festus Akinbusoye is another councillor for the Abbey Road ward. “You’ve got Buckingham Palace, you’ve got Tower Bridge, the London Eye and Madame Tussauds, and [yet] people want to come and cross a zebra crossing knowing that they’ve probably crossed several zebra crossings before they got here. I am proud of our zebra crossing. It’s good for Abbey Road, it’s good for Westminster and it’s good for London,” he says.
There’s an irony here. The current crossing isn’t even where the famous shot was taken: the original crossing was moved by several metres more than 45 years ago. And the album was initially to be called Everest. The Beatles toyed with going to the Himalayas for the shoot, which would have (probably) deterred the TikTokers. Photographer Iain Macmillan only took six shots for the eventual sleeve (compared to the roughly 1000-a-day now).
The simple snap has certainly left a Himalayan legacy. One cab driver, who gives his name as Mark, even parks on the pavement to take a photo of his fare crossing the road. She’s a tourist from Canada who’s also just been to McCartney’s house nearby.
“I didn’t have to do that for her,” Mark says afterwards. “I could get a ticket parked here. But why be miserable? There’s loads of shit going on in the world. It ain’t no drama for me to take a picture.”
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