Where you grew up is probably awesome. Is it as awesome as Ealing?

I grew up in a nondescript terraced house in a nondescript little road in a nondescript part of a relatively nondescript borough. That's how I saw it when I was growing up, it's by and large how it would be seen now. Between Northfields and South Ealing on the Piccadilly line. When people look at Northfields and South Ealing on the blue piccadilly, they don't think to themselves "there is the glamorous centre of the universe!" and they're right not to.

I think fondly of it, but it's hardly a golden wonderland. When growing up, I imagined many more exciting, meaningful places.

Except ... I was wrong. It's turns out Ealing actually is the most significant and amazing place in the world. Who knew?

If you grew up in what you thought was a fairly nondescript place, you might well find out on a little investigation that it's full of secrets and sites of wonder.

Though I've always been a chap interested in acquiring knowledge, I was surprisingly uncurious and unimpressed about the wonders all about me growing up.

If you're a film fan anywhere in the world, you hear the word Ealing, you surely follow it with "Comedies" or "Studios". I knew about Ealing Studios growing up, I knew because they were 10 minutes walk away but I didn't fully appreciate how enormously excellent a place those studios have a place in the history of world cinema, how "Ealing" carries as much cache and inherent meaning as, say,  "spaghetti western", "screwball", "Disney" (well maybe not quite Disney ...) or "film noir".

So I had little excuse for not realising Ealing was a bit marvellous. Even more so as, at my first Ealing home (where we left when I was 5) our nextdoor neighbour, Tony, had collaborated on an actual Top 3 single in the early 80s, which we found terribly exciting. As a child, that was his most exciting feat. When I heard about him also being in bands with oldies with names like Jack Bruce and Jeff Beck, that seemed comparatively small fry. Just the most renowned instrumentalists in the history of rock'n'roll.

Aah, the history of rock'n'roll, that's what little Ealing was really about. When I say little Ealing, I also mean Little Ealing, the specific area where I lived. Who was a former student of the former convent school across the road? Mary O'Brien... who became Dusty Springfield.

And just a bit of a walk away, over towards Ealing Common, around the same time Dusty was growing up, so was Peter Townshend. And just by Ealing Broadway was the Ealing Club, where Jagger and Richards met Jones and the Stones played many of their first gigs, where The Who and Cream and Manfred Mann and Fleetwood Mac were all part of Alexis Korner's scene.

Townshend and Ronnie Wood also went to Ealing Art College. As would Freddie Mercury. I remember going into a pub near me when I was about 19, no longer a Queen fan, and seeing a little bit on the wall about Mercury hanging out there, and thinking how insanely excited that would have made me a few years earlier.

Oh, and look, that's not all. The park just over the road from mine was called Blondin Park, and that's because Charles Blondin, the great daredevil of the 19th century who was the first man to tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, when he decided he needed to chill out a bit, retired and died in Northfields.

And the Brentham club, the scene of many teen cricket matches, was where none other than Fred Perry, master of the polo shirt, learnt his tennis.

There's more, plenty more. That acid jazz thing of the early 90s, Jamiroquai and the Brand New Heavies and what have you, that's Ealing. Hell, there's Sid James and Peter Crouch and Neil Kinnock who I stuck my tongue out at. There's Ho Chi Minh, too ...

Ealing may be a little bit remarkable, i mean, there can't be too many suburbs that can really claim to be the birthplace of British rock'n'roll and not be laughed at, but I bet if you looked into it, you'd find some pretty amazing things about where you're from, things someone told you when you were a kid but you didn't care about, but now are just mindblowing.

All those blue plaques for slightly boring historical figures in the centre of London, but by the 20th century, it was all going on in the suburbs, wasn't it? That's where the early history was made.