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Forty years ago on Saturday, one of the pop world's most infamous and imitated album covers was shot in a little side street in north London.The idea for the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album was initially to call it Everest, after the favourite brand of cigarettes smoked by their engineer Geoff Emerik. Then the thought of doing a Himalayan cover helped kill the idea, and instead they considered doing shoot closer to home.

"There's a sketch Paul McCartney did with four little stick men crossing the Zebra," says Brian Southall, author of the history of Abbey Road Studios.

"It gave a pretty good idea of what they wanted."

On the 8 August 1969 that the Fab Four walked out of No 3 Abbey Road, having finished basic work on what would be - and they subsequently said they knew would be - their last album.