Abbey Road

One of our first days in London, a group of us took a trip see the most famous crosswalk in the entire world. I am talking of course about the crosswalk at Abbey Road, where The Beatles had their picture taken walking across the road. This picture was made into the album cover of one of their last albums, also titled "Abbey Road" and was released in 1969. "Abbey Road" became the most successful Beatles album, debuting in the UK at #1.

We took the tubes straight to the stop where Abbey Road is and it was a 10 minute walk from there. When we first got there we didn't even know which crosswalk it was. It looked nothing like it did on the album cover, but of course that's because 1. it was Winter and the original picture was taken in the Summer and 2. because the original picture was taken almost 40 years ago.

It took Brian Peters and myself 20 minutes to get two good pictures each walking across the crosswalk because of the heavy traffic. We still got the shots and proceeded to check out the famous Abbey Road Studio which you can see in the background of this picture. This studio is where the Beatles recorded almost all of their albums 50 years ago.




There is a white wall in front of the Abbey Road Studio covered in graffiti, song lyrics, and signatures and the dates they wrote them all, which I read later is encouraged. However the one thing that surprised all of us is that this wall had no date before Christmas of this past year. Meaning, this wall is whitewashed every few weeks. We found this amazing because the whole entire wall was covered in writing. As you can see, the entire wall is filled after only being whitewashed blank barely 2 weeks earlier. Here is some pictures of the signatures that were present on the wall.













The Abbey Road Studio doesn't grant access but I was able to take a picture from outside of it after walking through the graffiti gate. Overall this was a really cool experience to take the pilgrimage that many thousands of Beatles fans have taken over the years and to walk across the same crosswalk the Beatles once did, as well as other famous bands and singers such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Green Day, Pink, and Wings to name a few.

-Sean Haddad (Danbury, CT)