David Bowie’s teenage home to be transformed into 'immersive' museum experience

The South London home where music legend David Bowie spent his teenage years will be transformed by the Heritage of London Trust into an “immersive” museum experience after renovation.

The trust announced last week that it had acquired the home at 4 Plaistow Grove in Bromley where David Robert Jones, the boy who became Bowie, lived from the ages of 8 to 20.

“The property marks the site where Bowie’s musical journey began,” the trust said in a news release. “It was here that he wrote his formative songs and regularly returned in the following years, as he wrote his breakthrough smash hit Space Oddity, which rocketed him to pop fame.”

Between 1955 and 1967, Bowie lived at "two up, two down" railway workers’ cottage, listening to Little Richard records in his 9 ft x 10 ft bedroom. It is located near the Croydon Road Recreation Ground bandstand, the site of the 1969 Growth Summer Festival where he performed, which was restored in 2024.

“We spent so much time together, listening to and playing music,” the artist and musician George Underwood, a lifelong friend of Bowie’s, said in a statement.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say David’s music saved them or changed their life. It’s amazing that he could do that and even more amazing that it all started here, from such small beginnings, in this house. We were dreamers and look what he became.”

The home was in the family until 1970. The trust said it is working to restore it to its original early 1960s appearance and developing Bowie’s House, as it will be called, with curator Geoffrey Marsh.

Marsh is known for co-curating the Victoria & Albert Museum's 2013 blockbuster exhibition "David Bowie Is” – which showcased more than 300 objects from Bowie's personal archive and later toured internationally.

But the trust said Bowie’s House will feature “a never-before-seen archive.” And the “immersive experience,” as the trust called it, will center on Bowie’s bedroom, a space that the musician himself had called his “entire world.”

“I had books up there, my music up there, my record player,” Bowie once said, as cited by Marsh. “Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man's-land of the living room."

The trust said that Bowie’s House will host creative and skills workshops for young people, an initiative inspired by the musician’s 1969 Beckenham Arts Lab, which offered opportunities "for everybody.”

The house was purchased with an unspecified gift from philanthropists Michael and Isobel Holland. A fundraising drive for the restoration will launch this month, anchored by a major £500,000 grant from the Jones Day Foundation, a charitable foundation funded by attorneys and staff of the Jones Day law firm.

“David Bowie was a proud Londoner,” Nicola Stacey, the director of the Heritage of London Trust said. “Even though his career took him all over the world, he always remembered where he came from and the community that supported him as he grew up.”

Bowie’s House is expected to open to the public by the end of 2027.