📍Tottenham, London N17, UK
1988 – 2006“Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham, north London, in May 1988. Her mother, Penny, was just eighteen, and her father left when Adele was very small, so she was raised by her mother with the help of a large, close-knit family of aunts and grandparents nearby. Home was a small flat in Tottenham, a working-class, multicultural corner of north London, and though money was tight, it was full of music: her mother loved the Cure and took her to gigs, and Adele grew up singing along to everything from the Spice Girls to Gabrielle, for whom her mother once made her a sequinned eye patch. When she was nine, she and her mother moved to Brighton for a couple of years, and then back to south London, first to Brixton and then to a flat above a shop in West Norwood, a neighbourhood of Victorian terraces and hills with views of the city. She discovered the voices that changed her in a bargain bin at a record shop: albums by Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, which taught her how much feeling a singer could carry. At fourteen she went to the BRIT School for Performing Arts in Croydon, where she began writing her own songs. At sixteen she wrote Hometown Glory, a love song to West Norwood and to London, after her mother suggested she move away for university. A friend posted her demo online, and within a year she had a record deal. Her debut album, 19, was released in 2008, and its songs, and the ones that followed, are full of the London streets where she grew up. She remains a devoted Tottenham Hotspur fan, and has said that the flat in West Norwood she shared with her mum was the best home she has ever lived in.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today