📍Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, UK
1992 – 2010“Charlotte Emma Aitchison, known as Charli XCX, was born in Cambridge in August 1992 and grew up in Start Hill, a small Essex village near Stansted Airport, on the edge of the market town of Bishop's Stortford. Her father, Jon, is Scottish, and her mother, Shameera, was born in Uganda to a Gujarati Indian family and worked as a nurse. She went to Bishop's Stortford College, a private school, from the age of four, and she has spoken about feeling different there as a mixed-race girl with frizzy hair among mostly white classmates. She loved pop from the start, especially the Spice Girls and Britney Spears, and wrote her first songs as a child. At fourteen, using money borrowed from her parents, she recorded and self-released an album called 14 and posted songs on MySpace. Through MySpace, she was invited to perform at illegal warehouse raves in east London, and her parents, rather than forbidding it, drove her there and waited while she sang. She has said those nights, among the strobe lights and the strange, wild crowds, shaped her love of underground club music and her idea of what pop could be. She studied briefly at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before leaving to focus on music. She co-wrote Icona Pop's I Love It and sang on Iggy Azalea's Fancy, and in 2024 her album Brat became a cultural phenomenon. The contrast between the quiet Essex village of her childhood and the London raves her parents took her to remains at the heart of her music.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today