The address may not sound familiar, and the street name is best known as the heart of British tailoring. But 3 Savile Row is one of the most significant buildings in British pop and rock: the former home of the Beatles’ record label Apple Corps, and the location of the band’s final public performance when they took to its rooftop in 1969.
Apple Corps has now reacquired the building in Mayfair, central London, and plans to open it to the public as a new tourist attraction in 2027.
Across seven floors, The Beatles at 3 Savile Row will showcase items from the Apple Corps archives and host temporary exhibitions and a shop. The biggest attractions, however, will be a re-creation of the studio where the band recorded their last album, Let It Be, and access to the rooftop where that poignant final concert was performed.
Paul McCartney, who recently revisited the Georgian mansion house, said: “There are so many special memories within the walls, not to mention the rooftop. The team have put together some really impressive plans and I’m excited for people to see it when it’s ready.” His bandmate Ringo Starr described it as “like coming home”.
READ MORE
The Beatles founded Apple Corps in the late 1960s to gain control of their own financial affairs and with the intention of backing other artistic and business ventures, ranging from music and film to retail and electronics. When the band split in 1970, it found new purpose as the guardian of their legacy, stewarded by their former road manager, Neil Aspinall, until shortly before his death in 2008.
Apple Corps left Savile Row in 1976 and today the company’s chief executive is Tom Greene, who is overseeing the ambitious return. “Every single day, fans are taking pictures of the outside of 3 Savile Row – but next year they can go in,” he said. Regarding the rooftop, he confided: “Even the railings remain the same from that famous day in 1969.”
That open-air performance featured five new Beatles songs, performed across nine takes: Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got a Feeling, One After 909 and Dig a Pony, plus a rendition of God Save the Queen. The unadvertised gig was filmed for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary about the making of Let it Be, and attracted an astonished crowd of passersby – plus the police. Two officers entered the building, climbed to the roof and switched off the band’s amps, though the band still managed to perform one last take of Get Back.
[ The bond between John Lennon and Paul McCartney: ‘For sure they loved each other’Opens in new window ]
Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, called the plans for The Beatles at 3 Savile Row “hugely exciting” and said the attraction would “captivate Londoners and visitors from across the globe”.
Anyone thinking the project comes decades too late, meanwhile, can be disabused by the band’s career in the 2020s so far.
In 2021, Disney released Get Back – an acclaimed reworking of footage recorded for Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute Let it Be film. Made by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, the three-part documentary ran to nearly eight hours and spawned a further standalone film of the 3 Savile Row performance.
Then, in 2023, the band released a “new” song – Now and Then – which used AI technology to enhance demo recordings of the late John Lennon and George Harrison with newly recorded parts by McCartney and Starr. It reached No 1 in the UK, creating a record-breaking 54-year gap between chart-topping singles for a band.
Another documentary film followed in 2024, with the Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64 focused on the moment the band broke the US and featuring new interviews with McCartney and Starr.
And last year, the career-spanning Beatles Anthology project, which originally told the band’s story across three albums of demos and outtakes, a TV documentary and a book in 1995 and 1996, was reissued and updated with a fourth album and a new documentary episode.
McCartney and Starr, meanwhile, have continued to release new music, with McCartney’s next album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due for release on May 29th. Featuring ruminative songs that contemplate his parents, his marriage, his boyhood in Liverpool and his memories of his Beatles bandmates, it also includes his first duet with Starr.
And the biographies keep on coming. Sam Mendes is currently filming one about each band member, for simultaneous release in April 2028. The “four-film cinematic event” will star Paul Mescal as McCartney, Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Joseph Quinn as Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Starr.
Likely to arrive before that is Hamburg Days, a TV drama focusing on the band’s formative years playing a concert residency in the German city’s red light district. Now filming, with UK broadcast rights acquired by the BBC, the series is scripted by Jamie Carragher, part of the writing team for Succession.
Finally, Beatles aficionados are also still anticipating the second volume in All These Years, a trilogy of biographies by Mark Lewisohn, arguably the pre-eminent Beatles historian. The first volume, Tune In, was published in 2013 after a decade of work. Lewisohn said in February that he couldn’t give a firm sense of when part two would arrive. “I’ve left no stone unturned, and in doing so found wonderful things,” he said. “But the problem is I’ve got too much. So it’s very hard to get any momentum going.” – Guardian
