More than most rock groups, the Kinks made the most of their neighborhood ties in their lives and songs. Their 1971 album Muswell Hillbillies, after all, was a punning tribute to the London neighborhood of Muswell Hill where most of them grew up, in particular brothers Ray and Dave Davies. There weren’t and aren’t stereotypical hillbillies in Muswell Hill, or indeed strong country music roots in general, which didn’t stop the Kinks from sometimes incorporating country accents into their music. 

Alas, the pub in which the band pose on the cover of the Muswell Hillbillies LP isn’t in Muswell Hill. It was in the Archway Tavern, about two miles away from Muswell Hill itself. But there is a pub in Muswell Hill that occupies a top place in Kinks history, which you can still visit if you’re fanatical enough to do a Kinks history tour of sorts.

I didn’t get to all of them when I walked around Muswell Hill with a British friend in early June, but I got to the ones I most wanted to see, as well as a landmark in the neighborhood that was crucial to the birth of another top 1960s British rock outfit. My friend was armed with the Singing Streets app that identifies and describes British music sites on your phone, and while I’m not a big fan of apps or spending too much time looking at a phone in general, it does help in finding these spots and filling in useful background info.

Muswell Hill, incidentally, really is a hill, and you get views of the London skyline from many of its vantage points. London isn’t anywhere near as hilly as where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the hill named Muswell isn’t all that high (reaching about 330 feet above sea level), but it’s a pretty steep uphill if you’re approaching it from many other neighborhoods. The Davies family was far from wealthy, but the area seems pretty well off today, and one Davies-related property is currently selling for a shockingly high price (details to come).

To start with sort of a non-site, Les Aldrich Music, the store where Ray Davies’s first guitar was purchased, was on one of Muswell Hill’s main thoroughfares, Fortis Green, until recently. Very recently, actually, closing in 2023 after 78 years, by which time it was North London’s longest-running music store. An unrelated math tutoring center now occupies the space.

There’s better viewing a bit off the main roads at the first home Ray had as a married man, in the mid-1960s. He’d recently wed his first wife, Rasa, who gave birth to his first daughter around this time. The home is the one on the left:

Moving up in the world as the Kinks kept on having hits over the next three years or so, he moved only a ten-minute or so walk away to this substantially larger property, around the time he wrote one of the group’s most famous songs, “Waterloo Sunset”:

Kinks biographies give the impression the in the mid-20th century, Muswell Hill wasn’t an especially affluent neighborhood, though hardly a poverty-stricken one. These days, it must be a desirable one, certainly in certain parts. This four-bedroom home, on the Fortis Green street a little downhill from the main drag, is now for sale at £2,150,000, a price befitting a former owner who wrote the song “Most Exclusive Residence for Sale”:

The two big attractions on the Kinks trail are back up Fortis Green a few blocks. In the center is the home in which Ray and Dave Davies grew up:

Families were often bigger then — sometimes way bigger. The Davies brothers had six older sisters (and no older brothers). It wasn’t a wealthy household, the father making his living as a slaughterhouse worker. Even considering all eight kids (another born to one of the daughters was also raised here) weren’t living in the home at the same time, it must have been quite a challenge to fit and support such a large family in such a relatively modest space. But that wasn’t as out of the ordinary then as now. The family wasn’t always as big as it could have been, as one sister died in her early thirties, and another emigrated to Australia.

Directly across the road from the house is a site just as major: The Clissold Arms, the pub where the Davies brothers first performed in public, in December 1960:

Although this has become a Kinks shrine of sorts, as we’ll soon see, it’s still very much a working pub with a Greek-cuisined restaurant. It’s not shy about billing itself as the best community pub in London:

Inside, in the front of the pub within view of their family home, is a Kinks room filled with memorabilia about the group’s career:

Apparently there are still performances there, or at least music, in the room, judging by some soundboard-like equipment.

The Kinks didn’t stay in Muswell Hill forever, though they maintained ties to the area by founding their own studio in the region. At least in the 1960s, however, it’s striking how physically close Ray Davies stayed to his roots, when he could have afforded a wide choice of residences throughout London.

There are some other Kinks sites in the area I didn’t get to, namely the group’s still active Konk studios, established in 1973, and the school the Davies brothers attended with Kinks bassist Pete Quaife (Rod Stewart also went there). I’m not enough of a diehard to make a day out of it, especially a rainy one, but those sites are out there for the faithful.

I was, however, determined to catch one more landmark on Fortis Green between the main shopping drag and the home/pub. Probably not paid homage to by many pilgrims, the home that gave Fairport Convention their name is not only still there, but still bears the name Fairport. You can’t easily tell from the street, but look closely at a sign on the side of the house:

This was the home of Fairport guitarist Simon Nicol, who founded the group with fellow guitarist Richard Thompson and bassist Ashley Hutchings. The band practiced in the home above the office, or surgery as it’s called in the UK, where Nicol’s father had practiced medicine. It’s far more common in the UK for some homes to have actual names, not just addresses, John Lennon’s boyhood home being titled “Mendips” as one example. This Muswell Hill home’s name supplied half of the group’s name. Nicol was extremely young when Fairport got off the ground, leaving school at age fifteen, starting to perform with them at age sixteen, and starting to record with them at age seventeen. He’s still in Fairport Convention, though he took some time outside of the band in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s a smaller “Fairport” marker on the side of the home, to reinforce the connection:

Muswell Hill, incidentally, isn’t far down the hill from Alexandra Palace. If you’re in reasonable shape, you can make much of an afternoon of starting at Alexandra Palace and ambling down toward Muswell Hill. Alexandra Palace was one of the few remaining London landmarks I’ve wanted to visit that I hadn’t until this June trip that also included Muswell Hill. It’s a very active space for performances of all kinds, though perhaps the most legendary rock one it hosted took place many years in 1967, as the psychedelic rock festival 14 Hour Technicolor Dream:

There’s also a transmitter on the grounds, as the first BBC telecasts were from here in 1936, as you can learn about in a small permanent exhibit inside:

It’s also one of the highest vantage points in London, from which you can get some views of the city’s skyline: