Tittenhurst Park
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Tittenhurst Park was the home of John Lennon and Yoko Ono from the late summer of 1969 until the end of 1971, and then the home of Ringo Starr and family until the late 1980s. It is located on a hundred-acre estate in Ascot, England.
Lennon purchased this Georgian manor house and land after the sale of Kenwood, his earlier home with first wife Cynthia Lennon, because of its resemblance to Calderstones Park in Liverpool, where he had spent time as a child. He and Ono spent twice what the estate was originally worth, transforming the interior of the house to their liking, commissioning a set of hand-woven Oriental rugs, and installing a man-made lake which they could see from their bedroom window.
The last Beatles photo session took place at Tittenhurst Park on August 22, 1969, and the photos were used for the front and back covers of their Hey Jude album (a collection of single sides) early in 1970. Also during that year, and in the wake of the Beatles' breakup, Lennon built his own recording studio, dubbed Ascot Sound Studios, in the estate grounds, where he and Ono recorded their next several albums. The matching cover photos of their twin Plastic Ono Band albums were taken at Tittenhurst by the pair, using an Instamatic camera, and portions of the Imagine movie-length video – which included selections from the Fly album – were also filmed in the grounds.
During 1970 and 1971, Lennon and Ono began to visit the United States, first for Primal Therapy at Dr. Arthur Janov's Primal Institute in California, then for child custody hearings over Ono's daughter Kyoko Chan Cox, in Houston and New York City. Ono spent her late teens and twenties living in New York (including Scarsdale and Greenwich Village), and felt more at home there than in England – and so did Lennon, once he'd had a taste of Village life, as they rented a Bank Street apartment late that year.
Deciding to stay long-term in the United States, Lennon sold Tittenhurst Park to a longtime friend, who could make use of the grounds and the recording studio – his former bandmate Ringo Starr, whose family moved in and stayed until 1988. Throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, the recording studio was still in use. Portions of T. Rex's film Born to Boogie was shot there, and the house also saw a social visit from cult folk musician Nick Drake.
Since 1988, when the property was sold to Zayed al-Nahyan, major renovation of the manor has been carried out, and the interior no longer resembles the house lived in by Lennon and Starr.