📍East Sheen, London SW14, UK
1955 – 1973“Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in June 1955 and grew up in East Sheen, a leafy suburb of south-west London near Richmond Park. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were both mathematicians from Birmingham who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially sold computer, so computers and mathematics were normal topics of conversation at home. He was the eldest of four children, and the family often discussed puzzles and ideas at the dinner table. He went to Sheen Mount Primary School, and then to Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He was a keen trainspotter and built a model railway in his bedroom, and through it he taught himself electronics, building gadgets to control the trains. He has recalled a conversation with his father about how computers might one day make connections the way the human brain does, linking ideas that are not obviously related, an idea that stayed with him for decades. At Queen's College, Oxford, where he studied physics, he built his first computer from a soldering iron, a Motorola processor and an old television set. In 1989, working at CERN near Geneva, he proposed a system for linking documents on different computers, and by the end of 1990 he had built the first web browser and server. He chose not to patent the World Wide Web, so that it could be free for everyone. He was knighted in 2004.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today