South East London - Brixton & Beckenham
Brixton, at the southern end of the Victoria Line from Walthamstow, is today, like many London neighbourhoods, a blend of Afro-Caribbean culture and small-plate gentrification. In 1947, however, it was where David Jones was born, on 8 January. A Bowie mural, by Australian artist James Cochrane, is something of a shrine, where visitors lay flowers and messages. Brixton Brewery even makes a Bowie-inspired beer, Low Voltage, which references the artist’s 1977 album Low and features a lightning bolt design on the can.
Bowie moved to Beckenham, just 6.5 miles away, in 1969 and it marked a new stage in the future star’s career. He performed in the local Three Tuns pub, organised free arts festivals and lived in a sixties style commune - in a Victorian mansion, called Haddon Hall. It’s claimed that these years were the ones in which Ziggy Stardust was conceived.
Berlin, Germany
Bowie was in bad shape when he moved to Berlin in 1976, consumed by cocaine addiction. Although he started his time there being debaucherous with Iggy Pop, he eventually moved to a low-key apartment in West Berlin’s Schöneberg neighbourhood, helped by his assistant Coco Schwab. After the excesses of Los Angeles, the gritty realism of a divided German capital and the fact that nobody looked twice at him appealed - indeed, one night he spontaneously got up on stage to sing and was asked to stop by the audience, as they’d come to see someone else. Being freed from the pressure of fame seems to have re-released his creative spirit, and it was in Berlin that he recorded some of his best work - Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979). Fans should book a tour of Hansa Studios and swing by the apartment at Hauptstraße 155.
New Mexico, USA
This southwestern state has long been associated with an otherworldliness - it is, after all, the state from which one of the most compelling alien narratives of our time emerged. Far beyond that, however, its surreal landscape, studded with bizarre rock formations and echoing canyons, all bathed in desert light, has been a siren song for artists and seekers for years. Small wonder that Bowie felt such an affinity with New Mexico when he filmed cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976. Head to Fenton Lake to discover the landscape in which the film’s opening crash scene was captured, and explore the unnervingly pale, ever-shifting dunes of White Sands National Monument where many scenes referencing extraplanetary life were shot. Book a room at the Hotel Andaluz in downtown Albuquerque: this is where Bowie’s character is confined as he succumbs to the temptations of life on earth.
Coober Pedy, The Warrumbungles and Carinda - Australia
Some of the scenes from The Man who Fell to Earth were filmed in Coober Pedy, a remote opal mining town located in the northern corner of South Australia. Like New Mexico, the location features a bizarrely lunar desert landscape, where blistering heat drives residents to underground dwellings in the summer months. One state over, in New South Wales, the Warrumbungle National Park and Carinda, separated by approximately 185 kilometres, provided the setting for the unforgettable music video to 1983’s Let’s Dance. Local pub, The Carinda Hotel, has become a pilgrimage site for Bowie fans and the town has embraced its importance in the Bowie universe by hosting an annual Let’s Dance Festival in October. Combine this with a hiking trip in the Warrumbungles, which feature a dramatic volcanic landscape, punctuated by striking rock formations.
New York City, USA
This was Bowie’s home from the 1990s until his death in 2016 - although he’d visited in his early twenties, describing it as a city he had fantasised about since his teens. The experience was as hedonistic as you’d expect from this period of the artist’s life, and he spoke of going to bed at 4 or 5 in the morning, rarely resurfacing before midday. Moving there with his wife Iman in 1992, his perspective of the city would have been vastly different, as the pair lived a private life in the penthouse apartment at 285 Lafayette Street in SoHo.
You can book a Bowie walking tour in New York, which takes in some of his favourite haunts. An avid reader, McNally Jackson books and The Strand on Broadway were two stores he regularly frequented. Additionally, spend some time sitting in Washington Square Park: thick with trees, alive with creativity and ripe for people-watching, it was once described by Bowie as “the emotional history of New York in a quick walk.”
