john lennon's house

 It's got to be said, visiting a stately home in England when you get the chance, is fucking nice.

For sheer lack of a better description.

Most of these big stately mansions are often in the deepest bowels of the home counties, [read: the private-school inhabited, rich, neighbouring shires of London]. I have some friends who actually own a stately home - it's gobsmackable - but mostly, just being able to see one of these places for an afternoon is a huge privilege.

It does make you a little depressed, as you know that no matter how hard you work in this lifetime, you will never get close to owning one.

Well. I got to see a very special home on the weekend. One that a friend of mine happens to be residing in and looking after for a short while.

It is none other than the previous home of John. Fucking. Lennon.

He lived there during some of the most famous years of his Beatles career, from 1964 until 1968. With his then-wife whom he swapped out for 1 x Yoko Ono, while doing a motherlode of LSD.

It's called 'Kenwood', named after Ken Wood, the guy who makes appliances. Yeah that one. The dude who made your food processor lived here just before John did.

Here's the full story if tudor architecture, the Beatles and LSD are of interest to you.

It's set in Weybrideg in Surrey, on the same private estate that Cliff Richard and other mostly-famous rich people live. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr also lived nearby for a short while.

It was so surreal. I got shown around the house, which now has a large amount of heavy, ostentatious furniture in it (its on the market for £15 million), and it was a little creepy walking around  I have to say.
Some believe he haunts it, so once that seed was sown, I was almost freaking out. ("Listen John Lennon, if you're there, please don't harm us," I think were the words that escaped my lips.)

It was super surreal seeing the master bedroom where he slept and the attic where he supposedly composed some of the biggest albums of all time like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, alongside singles like Hard Day's Night and Yellow Submarine.

That's just about the place I parked Tarquin, our Audi. Step aside John.

 
The house has been renovated a lot inside, but the garden and how it's been landscaped has remained pretty much how it was when he lived there. Only the pool has moved.

Apparently he spent most of his time there in a drug-induced stupor, daydreaming, writing music, playing with his son, and committing adultery.

He also did this, which some may argue was the beginning of the end.

 Before things went south: John and Cynthia in the garden. The steps and walls still remain like this.
 

Thanks to the massive pictorial archives that is Google Images, we could literally trace where he sat and stuff.

Apparently he once buried a load of LSD in the garden and never managed to find it again. Treasure hunt when I next visit?

John and Yoko in the garden.