Abbey Road is pop culture’s most iconic location.  It served as the title and backdrop to The Beatles’ eleventh studio album, and is the site of the world’s best known recording studios.

Scots photographer Iain Macmillan was given ten minutes with George, Paul, Ringo and John, to capture one of the most famous and most imitated album covers ever.  Now, a live webcam, allows Beatle fans and road lovers everywhere the chance to watch that legendary zebra-crossing 24/7.

Thinking about Abbey Road underlined how the condition of highways reveals much about the way wealth is redistributed within society. In certain parts of the world, the only usable highway stretches from the airport to the nearest Howard Johnson, or similar.  In between is usually the impoverished and under-developed tract housing of the indigenous population. Roads are not just a sign of cultural and political domination (think the Romans in Europe or when the Russians entered Afghanistan in 1979, they built two giant strips of blacktop, across the country), they also denote the level of progress within a civilization.

In his book Chroma, the late film-maker Derek Jarman noted:

Before the roads were asphalt grey, still dirt tracks, the dun-colored earth turned to mud in the winter, and in summer to dust.  Traveling was a filthy business.  Perhaps this is why country coats were brown and city coats were black.  I once heard a hundred-year-old man asked what the greatest change had been in his lifetime.  He might have answered flight, television or radio, but he said it was the tarring of the roads.  You can’t imagine what it was like traveling before they were metaled.

Similarly, novelist Peter Straub wrote in his famous horror tale Ghost Story

“…You know, sidewalks made a greater contribution to civilization than the piston engine.  Spring and winter in the old days you had to wade through mud, and you couldn’t enter a drawing room without tracking some of it in.  Summers, the dust was everywhere!”  Of course, he reflected, drawing rooms had gone out just about the time sidewalks had come in.

The Abbey Road Webcam can be viewed here