The Beatles in Basingstoke a look back on Lennon's 80th Birthday

The musician, who was shot dead aged 40 in New York in 1980, has continued to have an enduring influence on popular culture long after his murder.

In his memory we are looking back at the times the icon visited our town.

Whilst Basingstoke was evidently absent from any of the Beatles’ tour schedules; we know that the Pied Piper Restaurant was the first place the iconic band stopped at during the Magical Mystery Tour.

In September 1967 the Beatles and an entourage of about thirty people set off from London in a brightly painted coach on what was to become ‘the Magical Mystery Tour’.

Their intended destination that day was Cornwall but the coach made its first stop at the Pied Piper restaurant in the South-West corner of Basingstoke.

It is the only recorded visit the Fab Four made to the town but we do know John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited the town and the same restaurant again just sixteen months after the tour.

There are handful of official photographs of the Beatles taken inside the coach while it was parked outside the Pied Piper, that clearly show the familiar façade of the Stag & Hounds pub which has been preserved throughout the half-century; it became part of the Harvester chain at the end of the seventies.

A set of seven photographs of the Beatles, taken outside the Pied Piper on September 11, 1967, was auctioned by Christie’s in the nineties for an undisclosed fee.

These pictures were apparently sold with a set of autographs signed on a Pied Piper headed document.

The Pied Piper restaurant and filling station were on the main route between London and Southampton or the West Country until the M3 took control of through-traffic at the beginning of the seventies.

This was the point where the old Harrow Way by-pass met the Winchester Road.

Brighton Hill Roundabout was built in the same era as the M3 but the strip of Winchester Road that had once borne all that traffic was finally relieved of the responsibility in the nineties when a further spur was added to the roundabout, leaving this ancient piece of road as a local route to Pack Lane and the Berg Estate.

The landmarks that the Beatles would have seen have all gone, with the exception of the Stag & Hounds and the White House.

Interior of the Pied Piper

The Beatles had set out ‘the Magical Mystery Tour’ to generate footage for a film which was shown at Christmas in 1967 but it does not include any shots from the Basingstoke episode.

The Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double 7” EP with a 28-page booklet. On page 11 of the booklet (if you have a copy to hand) you will see a comic-strip story entitled ‘What a Marvellous Lunch’ and a reference to ‘the Magic Piper’.