FOR TEN MINUTES ON THE MORNING OF

August 8, 1969, The Beatles walked back and forth across the zebra crossing outside their studio, while a policeman detained the traffic and photographer Iain Macmillan captured the moment for posterity. In some images, as you’ll see in this issue of MOJO, Paul McCartney wears sandals. In the one that made the cut, he is barefoot; like a corpse, the conspiracy theorists would soon allege.

Less than two months later, the eleventh Beatles album was in the shops, and Macmillan’s cover shot had turned a pedestrian crossing into a site of pilgrimage. A brisk stroll away from the MOJO offices, the Abbey Road site is still thronged with tourists today; you can even watch them, exasperating the Uber drivers of north London, on a webcam at abbeyroad.com.

Everywhere The Beatles went, their gravitational allure rendered sacred. So, as part of our extensive celebration of Abbey Road’s anniversar y, it seemed like a neat idea to create two phantasmagorical maps of London and Liverpool, redrawing the cities on The Beatles’ own terms. It also felt apposite to put Paul’s original pencil sketch of how he envisaged the Abbey Road sleeve on the cover of this very special MOJO (Macmillan’s clarification of the design is in the top right-hand corner).

“Once there was a way to get back home,” as Paul sang. Fifty years on, with MOJO’s help, there still is.