The historic crosswalk in front of Abbey Road Studios now has a 24-hour live streaming web camera focused on the iconic crossing to show tourists trying to recreate the famous Beatles lineup photographed for the Abbey Road album cover.
The camera is installed atop a white wall in front of the Abbey Road recording studios — a wall that is painted and repainted whenever it fills up with love notes left in pen to John, Paul, George and Ringo.
To properly recreate the actual shot from 1969, the photographer needs to be directly in the middle of the street, but most shoot their photos from the sidewalk. (When I was there with my husband, son and his friend, we asked a stranger to take our picture, the one you see above.)
During the 1960’s, the Beatles made 90 percent of their recordings inside the studios. They came together in April, 1969 to record their final album and best-selling work as a group, ‘Abbey Road’.
January 3rd, 1970 marked the final Beatles song, I Me Mine, to be recorded inside Abbey Road. But the band continued to use the facility as solo artists, beginning with Paul McCartney and a new group called Wings. George Harrison went into Studio 3 to record his chart topping single My Sweet Lord and his triple album set All Things Must Pass.
In June of 1972, Pink Floyd began worked on the ground-breaking Dark Side Of The Moon there.
Abbey Road Studios today still offers recording, mixing, mastering and remastering, but also provides DVD authoring, and video services. Film projects to come out of the studio include the award winning Lord Of The Rings trilogy and a two of the Harry Potter movies.
See the Abbey Road live feed here (scroll down the page to see the feed).
You can grab screenshots and upload them to the website, like the one posted above.