Penny Lane, Liverpool

Penny Lane is a street in Mossley Hill, south Liverpool, about 800 m long, running from the old bus terminus at Smithdown Place. The Beatles song "Penny Lane", released in February 1967 alongside "Strawberry Fields Forever", names places around it, including a barber, a bank and the shelter on the roundabout.

The roundabout Lennon and McCartney changed buses at

Smithdown Place, at the top of Penny Lane, was one of Liverpool's main bus terminals in the 20th century. John Lennon and Paul McCartney used the roundabout there to change buses in their school days. When Lennon later talked about the song, he said writing it was a way of reliving childhood.

Before he moved to his aunt's house in Woolton in July 1946, Lennon's address was 9 Newcastle Road in Wavertree.

McCartney wrote most of "Penny Lane", which carries the Lennon-McCartney credit. The Beatles recorded it at EMI Studios in London between 29 December 1966 and 17 January 1967. It came out as a double A-side with Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" on 13 February 1967 in the US and 17 February in the UK. The single went to number 1 in the US and stopped at number 2 in the UK.

What the song points to

The places in the song were real businesses and buildings. The barber was Bioletti's. The fire station was on Mather Avenue. The shelter was a purpose-built building on its own island at the terminus, with a waiting room and toilets.

That shelter had a long second life. In the 1980s it was sold privately and turned into Sgt. Pepper's Bistro, which later closed. Its owner, Ray Maatook, got planning permission in 2013 for a glass first-floor extension. In March 2016 Liverpool Confidential reported the building had stood empty for more than ten years, and Wikipedia described it as still unopened in March 2023. We found no later report of it opening, so expect to see it from outside.

Why the signs keep disappearing

Penny Lane's street signs have been taken so often that the city council gave up for a while and painted the name straight onto walls. It stopped doing that in 2007 and put up signs that are harder to remove. Some still go missing.

One came back after 47 years. A former student emailed The Beatles Story in March 2023 to say he and friends had taken a Penny Lane sign after a night out in 1976. Liverpool City Council confirmed it was the sign that went missing that year. It was returned in November 2023 and is now on display at The Beatles Story on the Royal Albert Dock. The museum says it is the oldest stolen Penny Lane sign to have been returned.

The James Penny question

For years a claim went around that the street was named after James Penny, an 18th-century Liverpool slave trader. When Liverpool City Council discussed renaming streets linked to the slave trade in 2006, it left Penny Lane out, on the grounds that most people connect it with the song.

The claim came back on 12 June 2020, when four Penny Lane signs were spray-painted and "racist" was written on a wall above one. Residents had cleaned it off by midday.

Later that month National Museums Liverpool published its conclusion. After consulting slavery historian Laurence Westgaph, Tony Tibbles and Glen Huntley, it said there is no historical evidence linking Penny Lane to James Penny. The link had been shown in the International Slavery Museum's gallery since it opened in 1994, and the museum took it out. The earliest record of the lane dates from the 1840s, spelled "Pennies Lane"; maps from the 1700s show only an unnamed road there. Nobody has pinned down where the name did come from.

Penny Lane and the other south Liverpool sites

Penny Lane is often visited with two Lennon places in Woolton. Strawberry Field is about 2.5 km east of the street in a straight line, and Mendips, Lennon's home at 251 Menlove Avenue, about 2.8 km away. McCartney's childhood home is covered on the 20 Forthlin Road page.

Some searches ask about a John Lennon statue on Penny Lane. We found no source for one. Liverpool's city-centre Lennon statue is on Mathew Street.