Rock ‘n’ roll’s most famous traffic crossing is about to become even more ‘bonkers’

Bus drivers – talking when their vehicles are safely static at nearby bus stops – are both vigilant and resigned. “Most of the time, we wait,” says a driver taking me north up Abbey Road.

As we approach the studio, a man in a yellow polo shirt blocks the road between the bus and the crossing, directing four companions across, snapping away with his iPhone. Job done, he waves the bus through, a quasi-traffic warden. A second bus driver, taking me back south, says: “It’s hard because you don’t know who’s going over the crossing. You have to stop and check it out.”

Lisa Markwell uses the road daily. “It’s completely bonkers. And it’s all day, every day. I go down it every morning and I come back every afternoon and sometimes at the weekend, and they’re always there,” she says.

If Markwell is on her Vespa scooter, she’ll sometimes alert visitors if they’re at the wrong zebra crossing (there are two) or taking the picture from the wrong direction (the album photo looks south to north). “I save them the pain of getting home and realising that they’ve taken the wrong picture,” she says, adding that her husband will subtly photobomb with hand gestures or facial expressions.

As my bus experience attests, it’s actually the people taking the photos who are most at risk. “It’s really dangerous,” says Markwell. “Because buses go up there, there are loads of delivery vans and hundreds of scooters. And the [photographers] are completely mad, they’ve got their back to the traffic, they’re right in the middle, and there’s a bit of a corner [from Grove End Road into Abbey Road].” Back in 2017, one TripAdvisor user even wrote that “someone is going to get killed … Dead tourists won’t be very attractive.”

Caroline Sargent, a councillor in the Abbey Road ward, says that there have been “very few complaints” about the crossing in recent years. The road has the mandatory 20 miles per hour (30 kilometres per hour) speed limit. Still, Sargent says that visitors are “sometimes surprised to see that it’s an active pedestrian crossing at the junction of busy mains roads running through a very residential neighbourhood”. She adds that “local people driving do get frustrated, especially at school pick-up times, if they have to wait for tourists to recreate the iconic scene.”