TEN summers ago, your favourite newspaper found itself at the middle of a media scoop when it revealed discussions for potentially putting a “lollipop lady” – or man, etc – on the zebra crossing near the Abbey Road studios.

So many Beatles fans like to copy the famous 1969 album cover each day that there needed to be some sort of road safety control, one of the Tory councillors suggested.

That never happened, as the red and yellow stick didn’t really chime with the souvenir images that visitors were trying to get, but the debate inadvertently revived an argument as to whether Westminster City Council had actually relocated the crossing at some stage since the day of the album shoot. A council report had said: “By comparing photo­graphs with the Ordnance Survey maps, we believe that the crossing might have been further north, nearer 3 Abbey Road, which was the front house of the EMI Studios.”

Fans felt that this research was all wrong and guided by an old April’s Fool joke. Fab four devotee Galen Forret argued that you can match the pictures with little manhole covers in the road and features specific to the crossing – as circled above.

If you have to italicise the joke then it hasn’t worked, but, still, Beatles fans have yet to come together over a definitive answer.