Places they remember: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.

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Three popular songs of enormous cultural significance are ‘In My Life’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, all released by the Beatles in the 1960s and all set in the same part of Liverpool. In an original investigation, this article looks into the growth of that part of the city from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1950s, examining the changes to the landscape. This was as the initially rural environment gave way to a typical twentieth-century townscape of houses, roads, parks and schools. The memories of people who resided there are related and these along with old maps, photographs, newspaper articles and census details are examined to give a sense of the lived-in location that inspired the lyrics of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The phenomenon of palimpsest – ancient features slightly visible underneath modern ones – is applied to this study of the location and a new concept of inverse palimpsest – the old consciously superimposed on the new – is put forward in a novel approach to landscape analysis.