London: Still loving them, yeah yeah yeah!

The road name sign at Abbey Road in London, made famous by The Beatles in the 1960s. Photo / British Tourist Authority

Beatle mania grabbed me at 13 and never really loosened its grip.

Abbey Road, my first ever LP, arrived on my 16th birthday and has had primo place in my record collection since. Which is why, on a drizzly afternoon, I'm striding through Marylebone Station desperately seeking a man wielding a London Walks brochure.

Got him: he's a wee fellow in a flasher-like mackintosh but the brochure signals he is indeed Richard Porter, he of the near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Fab Four - so much so he's written several Beatles books and won the Beatles Brain of Britain title so many times they won't let him enter anymore.

He's so Beatles-besotted, he owns and runs the Beatles Coffee Shop in Finchley Road (next to the St Johns Wood Underground station on the Jubilee line) and started the London Beatles Fan Club.

You'd expect him to know a thing or two about the Fab Four and he doesn't disappoint in the next two and a quarter hours. On this less-than-inviting day and with brolly at the ready, Porter is talking while walking to a Kiwi, an Aussie, two Canadians and four Americans. He does this most days of the week with London's four-decades-old and still going strong original walking company, London Walks.

So off we go in the footsteps of John, Paul, Ringo and George, who four decades after they broke up are now firmly enshrined as Brit cultural icons. Porter reveals that their handwritten song lyrics, scribbled on airline stationary and the backs of greeting cards, are now on permanent display in the British Library, just steps from the Magna Carta and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And Paul McCartney's childhood home in Liverpool is owned by the National Trust, along with those of Winston Churchill, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.

In the first hour we check out the film locations for A Hard Day's Night and Help! and the registry office where John Lennon and George Harrison were first married (though not to each other).

We pause at the childhood home of leggy actress Jane Asher. Porter divulges Asher's parents (she a music professor and he a psychiatrist) were so broadminded that they allowed Jane's longtime boyfriend Paul McCartney and friend John Lennon to sleepover in her room. The upshot of one, late-night music session there was the seminal single I Want To Hold Your Hand, which originally had the less than memorable lyrics "Scrambled eggs I love your legs".

Next we swing past Apple headquarters where The Beatles played their famous rooftop session, and the gallery where John and Yoko Ono first met - and where it's generally agreed in our little walking huddle that things went to hell in a hand cart.

But the piece de resistance on this trip down musical memory lane is rocking up outside Abbey Road studios where The Beatles recorded over 200 songs from 1962 to 1970 and where Abbey Road was the last record they managed to complete while all playing together in the same studio.

Intriguingly the LP was initially to be called "Everest" - a name inspired not by the grandeur of the mountain, Porter explains, but by the preferred brand of cigarette smoked by the bands' recording engineer Geoff Emerick.

Apparently, someone then had the bright idea that the by-then-audaciously-wealthy band could go to the mountain to shoot the album cover.

But John said "F*** off" and it was finally agreed it would be Abbey Road, not after the recording studio, then called EMI Studios, but after the busy road outside.

Such was the success of the album that the studios were smartly renamed Abbey Road Studios soon after and the place has been a heaving musical shrine ever since.

We are far from alone as 50 people mill around outside the studio which is not open to the public because it's still churning out the music: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the Harry Potter movies' music was recorded here in recent times.

We are, we are reliably informed, just nine of the around 150,000 travellers who make the pilgrimage each year to this Beatles shrine.

And so we do what they all do: stop, look and take a moment to remember the wonderful music, leave an autograph, with hundreds of thousands of others on a much scrawled-upon wall, and take our lives in our hands by walking the world's most memorable zebra crossing.

Abbey Road is no sleepy back road, it's a traffic-crammed highway. When the album cover was shot on August 8, 1969 only six photos were taken as a helpful policeman was holding up the traffic at the time.

Then it's back to Richard Porter's cute little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop for a heartwarming brew, a few band postcards and of course, lashings of loud Beatles music.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Cathay Pacific has return economy class fares from Auckland to London starting from $2399 (all-inclusive), and several other specials, but that offer ends on July 31. Check cathaypacific.co.nz.

Beatles walks: To find out all about Richard Porter's Beatles walks, see beatlesinlondon.com.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Abbey Road on August 8, a
Beatles In My Life walk will leave Marylebone station at 9.20am and
cross the Abbey Road crossing 40 years to the minute after the famous photo shoot.

Further information: For general information on visiting Britain see visitbritain.co.nz

Robyn Langwell travelled to London courtesy of Cathay Pacific and Visit Britain.