Denmark Street (Tin Pan Alley)

This short, scruffy street between Charing Cross Road and St Giles High Street has arguably produced more British music per square metre than anywhere else on Earth. If these walls could talk — and some of them still have the graffiti to prove it — they'd play you a greatest hits spanning seventy years.

It started with sheet music. Lawrence Wright set up as the first music publisher here in nineteen eleven. By the late fifties, the street housed so many publishers, agents, and demo studios that it became known as Britain's Tin Pan Alley, after the famous song-plugging district in New York. The name stuck even as the business evolved from Tin Pan to rock and roll.

At number four, Regent Sounds Studio — a tiny basement room — is where the Rolling Stones recorded their first hit, Not Fade Away, and most of their debut album. The studio was so small that the musicians had to play practically on top of each other. At number nine, David Bowie used to recruit band members over coffee at a cafe called La Gioconda. And above number six, the Sex Pistols lived in a squalid flat where they wrote Anarchy in the U.K. The walls of that flat were covered in their graffiti and artwork.

The Twelve Bar Club, a former blacksmith's forge converted into a closet-sized music venue, helped launch the careers of Adele, KT Tunstall, Damien Rice, and The Libertines. It closed in twenty fifteen for redevelopment, and a lot of people are still angry about it.

The street is changing. Developers have moved in, and much of the old character has been scrubbed clean. But some of the guitar shops remain, and if you walk slowly, you can still feel the residual energy of a place where people came to make noise that changed the world.