The musician’s parents’ house will be extensively restored and will become an exhibition space in 2027.
David Bowie’s childhood home in south London is being opened to the public for the first time. The Heritage of London Trust has acquired the two-storey terraced house at 4 Plaistow Grove in Bromley, in which the singer, then of course David Jones, lived from 1955 to 1968.
The restoration is intended to recreate the house’s 1963 style, when Bowie was 16 years old. In the center is the musician’s small teenage room, barely nine square meters in size.
Bowie later described his teenage retreat as his “whole world” with a large collection of books and records. Here he developed his artistic ambitions. But this also has a serious background, because due to the not entirely easy family situation, the young David retreated back to his kingdom.
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As can be read in numerous reports about the musician, who died in 2016, he often canceled appointments with many friends in order to think and work alone at home.
Elvis singles and a photo of Little Richard
According to the organizers, the exhibition will feature previously unpublished archive pieces, including early Elvis singles and a cut-out photo of Little Richard that he stuck to his wall as a child and kept for his entire life. Memories of companions like George Underwood (who slapped Bowie at school and left him with his uneven irises) and Dana Gillespie are also part of the collection.
But it won’t stop at the exhibition: In addition to being used as a museum, the house will also offer space for creative workshops for young people in the future. This is inspired by Bowie’s Arts Lab idea in Beckenham. It’s not just about a monument, but literally about creative scope for future generations, they say.
However, it won’t happen that quickly, because before the doors to Bowie’s youth room open, there are still a few construction processes and approval procedures to go through. In concrete terms, this means that later renovations will be removed and extensions from the 1970s will be demolished. When Bowie’s older brother Terry was kicked out of the house, the two upstairs bedrooms were combined into a single room; In addition, there were no indoor toilets in the 1960s.
Immense costs
The opening is planned for the end of 2027. The high costs will be covered by start-up funding of 576,000 euros from the Jones Day Foundation, a subsidiary of the Jones Day law firm, and a fundraising campaign that is now starting. Just purchasing the property cost a lot of money. In 1997 the property was sold for 90,000 euros, but now it is worth over 500,000 euros.
A little fact on the side: Bromley has been visited for years because of another birth center. Naturalist Charles Darwin also grew up in the city (currently 88,000 residents).
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