The London home of Jimi Hendrix is set to become a permanent museum to the iconic guitarist.
The Guardian reports The Heritage Lottery Fund will soon announce a £1.2m grant to restore the rooms to their appearance during 1968, when Hendrix paid £30 a week to share the flat with his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham. The rooms will hold displays on his life, work and musical legacy.
A pair of blue plaques on the outside wall of the 18th-century listed building celebrates the two musical giants whose time there was separated by centuries: Hendrix lived at No 23 Brook Street, and George Frideric Handel at No 25. The Mayfair properties, separate houses when constructed in 1721, are now linked as the Handel House Museum.
The Georgian interiors that Handel occupied for almost 40 years, paying £60 a year for the entire house, have been meticulously recreated, but Hendrix's rooms, long since stripped of period detail, had become the offices of the museum staff.
Wesley Kerr, chair of the London committee of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said the sum of the two spaces was greater than their parts.
"The Handel House Museum is one of the most precious and evocative places in London,” said Kerr. “To visit the beautifully restored home where one of history's greatest composers lived, and invented some of the finest music ever written, is already pure joy."
He said the grant would open up another chapter in music history.
"It will make available to visitors the neighbouring flat where Jimi Hendrix, another extraordinary musical émigré from a more recent era, found inspiration and happiness, transcending musical boundaries in the heyday of rock and roll."
The new feature-length film, “Jimi Hendrix - Hear My Train A Comin'”, was released last month.
The documentary traces the guitarist's remarkable journey from his hardscrabble beginnings in Seattle, through his stint as a US Army paratrooper, unknown sideman to R&B stars such as Little Richard, Joey Dee and the Isley Brothers, and his discovery and ultimate international stardom.
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