Beatles Liverpool: Beyond the Cavern Club

The Cavern Club on Mathew Street is where most Beatles pilgrimages start, and it earns the visit: the band played the cellar venue nearly 300 times between 1961 and 1963, and although the 1970s original was demolished, the current club was rebuilt on the same site using around 15,000 bricks salvaged from the first building. Daytime entry and daytime live music are free, and the original 1957 entrance survives separately, a few doors along the same street, marked but easy to walk past without noticing. Mathew Street as a whole, with the Cavern Pub, statues of Lennon and Cilla Black, and a run of Beatles-themed shops, is worth twenty unhurried minutes even for a visitor who isn't a dedicated fan.

The more rewarding Beatles experience, though, sits several miles south of the centre, in the suburbs where the band actually grew up. The National Trust runs a minibus tour, capped at 15 people, into the interiors of Mendips on Menlove Avenue, where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi, and 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton, the McCartney family's council house, where Lennon and McCartney wrote many of their earliest songs together at the kitchen table. Both houses are furnished as they were in the 1950s, photography is not permitted inside, and tours book up in summer, so reserve ahead. Morning tours leave from Liverpool South Parkway station; afternoon tours leave from Speke Hall.

Two more names get repeated constantly without much context: Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. Penny Lane is a real street in the Mossley Hill area, not a themed attraction, lined with the barber shop, bank and roundabout the song describes; it rewards a quiet look rather than a special trip on its own. Strawberry Field, in Woolton, was a Salvation Army children's home whose red iron gates inspired the song; the home closed in 2005, but the gates and grounds are now open to the public with a small exhibition and a cafe that trains young people with additional needs, run by the Salvation Army. Both sit close enough to the childhood homes tour route to combine into one afternoon rather than two separate trips.

For the fuller institutional version of the story, the Beatles Story at the Royal Albert Dock recreates the Cavern and Hamburg club scenes with an included multimedia audio guide, and works well as a wet-weather option or a way to fill in context before or after the smaller, more atmospheric sites. It is a different kind of experience from the Cavern Club or the childhood homes, comprehensive rather than intimate, and the two are complementary rather than a choice between them.

Liverpool's music identity does not stop at 1970. The city produced more UK number-one hit acts than anywhere else in Britain, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, founded in 1840 and based at the Philharmonic Hall on Hope Street, is one of the country's oldest orchestras. International Beatleweek, held across the Cavern's three stages and venues around the city each August, is as much a Merseybeat festival as a strictly Beatles one; anyone building a trip around the music should look at the wider programme, not just the four names everyone already knows.