Richard Starkey was born on 7 July 1940 at 9 Madryn Street in the Welsh Streets district of Toxteth, Liverpool. His parents Richard and Elsie rented the house for ten shillings a week, the equivalent of fifty pence in modern decimal money. The neighbourhood was heavily damaged by the Liverpool Blitz during the Second World War. His parents separated when he was three. Elsie and her boy moved a few streets away to the smaller, cheaper two-up two-down at 10 Admiral Grove. The new house was a terrace built in the nineteenth century, with two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs, a narrow front garden and a yard at the back, the kind of standardised working-class housing that the Liverpool docks economy had thrown up across Toxteth in vast numbers.

Starr's infant school, St Silas Primary on Pengwern Street, was yards from the front door. He spent more time away from it than at it. A severe bout of peritonitis sent him to the Royal Children's Hospital for much of his seventh year. He fell behind in lessons, and Elsie taught him to read and write at home, between her shifts at the Empress. When Starr was thirteen, Elsie married Harry Graves, a Londoner who had come north for work. Graves was a kind stepfather, and he encouraged the boy's interest in drumming, eventually buying him his first proper kit. The family stayed at Admiral Grove. The neighbourhood was rough but it was theirs.

The Empress pub stood directly next to number 10, sharing a wall with the Starkey kitchen. Elsie worked there as a barmaid for years, and the regulars knew her boy as Ritchie. The pub appears on the cover of Sentimental Journey, Starr's first solo album, released in 1970. The album cover was photographed outside the front door. By that point Starr was one of the four most famous musicians on earth, but the choice of cover image was deliberate; he wanted the world to see where he came from. The Empress is still trading, still on the corner of Admiral Grove and High Park Street, and it is one of the small Liverpool pilgrimages that fans make alongside Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.

During the height of Beatlemania, the BBC producer Don Haworth made a documentary called The Mersey Sound that included footage of Starr returning to Admiral Grove. Fans had found the address. The film shows him mobbed on the pavement outside number 10, then climbing into George Harrison's open-topped sports car to escape. The scene captures a peculiar moment in the band's history: the Beatles were already too famous to walk down a Liverpool street unmolested, but they were not yet too famous to come home. Starr remained at Admiral Grove through 1963, the year the Beatles released Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You, and I Want to Hold Your Hand. He moved out as the world began to change.

Elsie and Harry stayed on at Admiral Grove longer than their son. Starr eventually persuaded them to move to a house he had bought them in Gateacre, a quieter district further south. In 2008, on his album Liverpool 8, Starr wrote a song titled for the postcode that includes both Madryn Street and Admiral Grove, paying explicit homage to the two addresses of his childhood. In 2010, Liverpool City Council announced that his birthplace at 9 Madryn Street, along with other houses in the Welsh Streets, was to be demolished. The campaign to save it gathered nearly four thousand signatures on an online petition, and the city had to board up the house to stop relic hunters stealing bricks. In 2012, Housing Minister Grant Shapps confirmed the house would be saved. Admiral Grove itself was never under threat. In 2016, the house at number 10 was bought by a Beatles fan who also owns properties once owned by George Harrison and by John Lennon's mother, Julia. The two-up two-down where Ringo grew up still stands. The pub next door still pours beer for whoever walks in.