David Bowie’s teenage dwelling to open as immersive expertise

The Heritage of London Trust has unveiled plans to open the house the place music legend David Bowie spent his teenage years as an “immersive experience”.

The star, then referred to as David Robert Jones, lived at 4 Plaistow Grove, a modest terraced home in south London, from the age of eight in 1955. He moved out in 1967 when he was 20 and the property remained the household dwelling till 1970.

The belief describes the home as “Bowie’s creative sanctuary” and the location the place his musical journey started.

“It was here that he wrote his earliest songs and regularly returned in the following years, as he wrote his breakthrough smash hit Space Oddity, which rocketed him to pop fame,” the belief stated in a press release asserting the information.

The heritage mission will restore the “two-up, two-down” railway employees’ cottage to its unique early Nineteen Sixties look.

With the assistance of curator Geoffrey Marsh, who co-curated of the globally profitable David Bowie Is exhibition on the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013, the restoration will use a never-before-seen archive to will recreate the inside format of the home precisely because it was when Bowie’s father commuted to work at charity Dr Barnado’s and his mom labored as a waitress.

“This immersive experience will centre on Bowie’s 9 ft x 10 ft bedroom – the specific site where his ‘trailblazing spirit’ was forged,” stated the belief.

Inspired by Bowie’s 1969 Beckenham Arts Lab, the artistic arts centre that aimed to supply alternatives for everyone, the location will host artistic and expertise workshops for younger folks.

A serious £500,000 grant from the Jones Day Foundation, a charitable basis funded by attorneys and employees of the Jones Day legislation agency, has already been secured in direction of the restoration, and a public fundraising marketing campaign will launch this month.

The home is close to the Edwardian Bowie Bandstand, the place the musician carried out in 1969, which was restored by Bromley Council and Heritage of London Trust in 2024.

Marsh stated: “It was in this small house, particularly in his tiny bedroom, that Bowie evolved from an ordinary suburban schoolboy to the beginnings of an extraordinary international stardom – as he said, ‘I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room.’”

Nicola Stacey, the director of the Heritage of London Trust, stated: “David Bowie was a proud Londoner. Even although his profession took him everywhere in the world, he all the time remembered the place he got here from and the group that supported him as he grew up.

“It’s wonderful to have this opportunity to tell his story and inspire a new generation of young people and it’s really important for the heritage of London to preserve this site.”

The home will current his youth not as nostalgia however as ignition: the place younger folks can see themselves mirrored in somebody who dared to assume otherwise. The mission will probably be developed alongside Heritage of London Trust’s Proud Places programme, persevering with Bowie’s personal youthful imaginative and prescient for the artistic arts.

The belief hopes to open Bowie’s House to the general public by the tip of 2027.