David Bowie was one of those singers who made it through to the mainstream and when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine, having just failed to reach his biblical allotment of three score years and ten, politicians of all different stripes were lining up to praise him even if they had little time for his music when he was alive. People spontaneously wanted to express their grief at his passing and many of them went to a Brixton mural to do so.

Ziggy Stardust

Bowie had invented the persona of Ziggy Stardust when he became a star, but he suddenly retired it at the Hammersmith Odeon when he was winding up an appearance there. He had not even told his bandmates, like lead guitarist Mick Ronson, but he was determined to go his own way, and was tired of pretending to be someone else in order to sell records. The music business can be very conservative but he was always looking forwards not backwards.

Ziggy Stardust aka David Bowie Mural in Glade Shopping Centre in Bromley. Photo Credit: © Ursula Petula Barzey.

Collaborations and Musical Creativity

After he had retired Ziggy, he dueted with people like both John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Queen and Mick Jagger and female singers like Cher and Tina Turner, even old crooners like Bing Crosby. He was always distinctly Bowie, however, even when he was writing songs for other groups like All the Young Dudes. This was a major hit for the group Mott the Hoople, whom Bowie encouraged to stay together and produced an album for.

He also acted in films like The Labyrinth, where he was a goblin, Merry Christmas Mr Jones, where he played a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, and, most memorably, in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which his other- worldly and androgynous features made him the perfect fit as an alien who comes to earth and has to adjust to life on this planet. Although not a huge success at the box office, Nicholas Roeg’s film has since built a cult following.

David Bowie in The Times 1947 to 2016. Photo Credit: © Ursula Petula Barzey.

Bowie was an all-round figure, an autodidact who was a fine painter himself and a major collector of artworks. To this day, the Victoria and Albert museum’s best-selling exhibition was the one in which this many-sided man displayed his collection of works of art. The exhibition ended up in Brooklyn, where Bowie lived with his second wife the model Iman. It travelled the world and has now found a permanent home in Hackney at the new Victoria & Albert Museum East Storehouse.

Bowie’s son by his first marriage goes by the family name of Jones. Duncan Jones is a film director and screenwriter, famous for directing the film Moon, his first feature, which won several awards. He was brought up largely by his father and is estranged from his mother, Bowie’s first wife Angela. Jones and his wife the photographer Rodene Roquilloe have two children. Bowie also had a daughter Lexi through his marriage to Iman.

David Bowie Brixton

Bowie was born in Brixton at 40, Stansfield Road. However, this house does not yet have a blue plaque on it because English heritage, who run the blue plaque scheme, insist that all people remembered through it must have been dead for at least twenty years before they are commemorated. Jimmy C’s mural of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, however, provided a focus for fans who wished to honour him after his death and left flowers at the site.

David Bowie Memorial by Jimmy C in Brixton. Photo Credit: © Edwin Lerner.

David Bowie Bromley

After Brixton, Bowie’s father moved the family to Bromley, which Bowie remembers more as his childhood home. He spent a lot of time in his bedroom there and made it a shrine to his childhood heroes, mostly singers like Elvis Presley. He did not care for the suburbs of London and is reported to have said that nearby Croydon was the pits. Bowie was anxious to make his mark in central London at venues like the Roundhouse and the Marquee.

In the 1960s he changed his last name from Jones to Bowie, reportedly influenced by the Bowie knife of James Bowie, the American pioneer. This was in the 1960s when the Monkees were making their breakthrough and Bowie was anxious not to be confused with Davey Jones, lead singer with that group. Incidentally, he always pronounced the name with a long ‘o’ in the middle so it sounded like ‘how’ rather than ‘low’.

David Bowie Mural in The Glades Shopping Centre Bromley by Marvellous Murals. Photo Credit: © Ursula Petula Barzey.

Bowie had his first hit with the single Space Oddity in 1969 and did not look back after that. He became a part of the rock scene in Britain and across the Atlantic in America, where he eventually made his home with Iman. He also lived for a time in Berlin and is credited with helping to bring down the Berlin Wall with songs like Heroes about those who bravely risked their lives crossing the wall to achieve freedom in West Germany.

In early 2026 on the tenth anniversary of the release of his final album Blackstar, which was sold to the public shortly before his death, it was announced that Bowie’s childhood home at 4 Plaistow Grove in Bromley is to be opened to the public. The house has been bought by the Heritage of London Trust and will be used as a performance and artistic space which will keep alive the name of David Bowie, a true Londoner, for future generations.