Who’s in the Background of the Beatles Abbey Road Cover?

Whether you’re a Beatles fan or not, you’re probably familiar with the band’s most iconic album cover, Abbey Road. This cover, of course, is the one with the four members of the Beatles strolling across a street in perfect unison. While the group is the main focal point of the photograph, there are some interesting things to be noted in the background.

Abbey Road was the 11th Beatles album, the last they recorded together even though Let It Be was the final album for the band (it had been mostly recorded prior to Abbey Road). The Abbey Road cover was unique in that the band’s name or album title didn’t appear anywhere on the cover. It simply showed the four members–Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison–walking across a street at a crosswalk, or zebra crossing as it is known in the United Kingdom and other places around the world.

The photo shoot took place in a convenient place for the band–right outside their studio on Abbey Road. Initially, their preliminary title for the album was going to be Everest which was from their engineer’s favorite cigarette brand. A shoot in the Himalayan mountains was going to take place but was scrapped for the much easier photo shoot in London.

On the morning of August 8, 1969, a policeman held traffic on the road so photographer Iain…