Große Freiheit

This guide to Große Freiheit in Hamburg starts in the autumn of 1960, with club owner Bruno Koschmider counting thirty marks into the hand of a nineteen-year-old guitarist named John Lennon, paid weekly to play his shabby vaudeville club alongside three other unknown Liverpool teenagers. It traces the street back to 1610, when a count carved this ground out of Hamburg's guild rules so that banned craftsmen and shunned worshippers could trade and pray free of the city's fees. Stand at number sixty-four and picture the wages still being counted out, decades of neon signs later.