Beatle tourism and the dilemma of iconic places versus real life

For years you refuse to sign up for one of those tourist routes through the London of the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. Why march in a procession listening to insufferable comments, if you yourself are capable of designing an itinerary to your liking? And you go into guide mode. One day you photograph the houses of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on Cheyne Walk and have a drink at the Chelsea Potter on King's Road, where the early Stones fraternized with Jimi Hendrix. Or take a look at the former Chelsea Drugstore location from You Can't Always Get What You Want. Without anyone's unwanted company. Another, you stand in front of 3 Savile Row, on whose terrace the Beatles played live for the last time. You look and evoke.

But one day you succumb. They catch you off guard and you end up signing up for a pilgrimage called Beatles in my life led by a certain Richard P. It starts at Marylebone train station, where scenes from A Hard Day's Night were filmed. And the truth, although it may be hard to admit, is that you end up having a great time. Because the guide knows everything, because his work has the endorsement of Paul McCartney himself and because he wears a blue shirt with yellow submarines printed on it and a threadbare bag with the cover of Abbey Road.

Richard P. makes you see things that you had not realized, like that at 34 Montagu Square, where Hendrix, John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived, Ringo Starr also lived (and endured them), only the drummer does not appear on the plaque because he is still alive and recording albums.

The triumphal closing of the route is the zebra crossing located in front of Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles improvised the iconic album cover. This end of the celebration, for Beatlemania, is the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel closing the tour of the Vatican museums, or of the bust of Nefertiti as the culmination of the Egyptian itinerary in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

The zebra crossing is a spectacle in itself, a “Beatles for a day” catwalk. But the most interesting thing is to see how the authorities try to harmonize the visitor's right to fool around with that of the neighbor to circulate on the street. A public employee is in charge of this, stopwatch in hand: "Hurry up, you have ten seconds to take the photo before the cars give way. You only have eight left..."

The task of this character is more transcendent than it seems: his countdown signals nothing less than the collision between the real city and the recreated city. His workplace is the epicenter of the debate about the harm that gregarious tourism causes to residents.

In Barcelona there is no Abbey Road, but there are places that social networks have turned into obligatory sets for evocation or posturing. Let's look at one, the Bisbe bridge, located in a crowded alley in the Gòtic. The uninformed tourist (the majority of those who let themselves be guided by Instagram or TikTok) ignores that there are still people alive who are older than this neo-Gothic monument; He is unaware that the neighborhood was remodeled a century ago to look more Gothic and beautiful and gives rise to impossible love legends that would relate this bridge to the Sighs of Venice bridge, which, by the way, did not host passionate transfers either, but rather penitentiary ones.

We can commission an official to time at Abbey Road the tourist's right to possess a piece of the city for a few seconds (the memory of the Beatles justifies it), but not in every place popularized by the networks. Against this trend, perhaps, the fatigue of the users themselves will be able to. Because, what merit is there in taking and posting the photos that everyone already has, being just one more link in a long chain of repetitions? Especially if they are based on misunderstandings.