Bolan's venue map is a London map — specifically a W1/WC2 map. From his early-teenage afternoons at the 2i's Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street, through Tyrannosaurus Rex's residencies at the Middle Earth Club on King Street, to late nights at the Speakeasy on Margaret Street and Morton's in Berkeley Square, the whole arc fits inside a tight rectangle of Soho, Covent Garden and Mayfair. He grew up in these streets, and he died coming home from them.

The venues track the scene underneath them. The 2i's was the birthplace of British rock and roll, still drawing teenage skifflers when Mark Feld was hanging around there in the early 1960s. By 1967–69 he had moved on to the Middle Earth, the psychedelic underground's favourite room, where Tyrannosaurus Rex became house regulars. A decade later, in 1977, he launched Dandy in the Underworld at the Roxy on Neal Street — a cellar then only a year old, the London punks' first proper clubhouse. Coffee bar, psych club, punk basement: Bolan kept finding the building where the next scene was gestating.

The late-career rooms are the plush ones. Tramp on Jermyn Street, where he took Gloria Jones dancing in December 1975, two months after their son Rolan was born — they went in early so the floor was still empty, Marc twirling to show her "how it's done". The Speakeasy on Margaret Street, the industry's after-hours hang. And Morton's, the Berkeley Square members' restaurant where the couple had dinner on the night of 15 September 1977, celebrating Gloria's return from California. From Morton's they drove home toward East Sheen; at 5am the Mini hit a sycamore on Barnes Common. All three of those late rooms sat within a short cab ride of each other, and none of them operates today in the form Bolan knew.

The few non-London venues sharpen the pattern rather than break it. A long-weekend Paris trip around 1964 — Left Bank, Rue Saint-Bernard, the Hôtel Montana — was Riggs O'Hara showing a teenage Bolan the city he was already itching to outgrow. Nine years later, the Beverly Wilshire: the August 1973 tour stop where a Rolling Stone reporter found him "personable and sweet and delicate — the opposite of the John Bonham, bull-in-a-china-shop rock star." Gloria Jones, interviewed in the same lobby in 2007, called it "a very special place for us." Bolan was a local wherever he went, but London was the local that mattered.