Voices: A pilgrimage to Harry Styles’s old bakery? Count me out…

Pity the villagers of Holmes Chapel in Cheshire, struggling to cope with the tidal wave of supporters flocking to see where Harry Styles grew up.

Having already produced special walking tour maps for fans, a local voluntary organisation is now recruiting guides to show off highlights including the bakery where the singer worked as a teenager, the spot where he had his first kiss (a little creepy?) and the Chinese restaurant where he reputedly treated Taylor Swift to a slap-up meal.

And who could blame them for responding to the level of interest (and for reasons of practicality: the maps were introduced in response to road safety concerns, apparently)?

Still, despite growing up nearby, I won’t be making the pop pilgrimage over there, now or ever. Nor do I want to visit the Gallaghers’ Burnage home, pre-Oasis (given their mum Peggy still lives there, she may not appreciate it, either); John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s childhood homes in Liverpool, which are available to tour with the National Trust; or any other similar pre-fame remnants of our musical heritage.

Of course, it’s understandable that fans want to go back to the start to connect with their favourites, to look at the suburban semi where their idol munched on cereal and faced teenage rites of passage. But if their lives weren’t so different then, the truth is that they are now. In fact, nothing underscores the gulf between a star today and the pre-spotlight hopeful they once were like the things they’ve left behind.

Which is why, on a trip to Barbados, I merrily whizzed past Rihanna Drive, so named after the small house where little Robyn Fenty grew up, and was far more interested in dawdling past One Sandy Lane, the beachside palace she’s reported to call home since she hit it big. For it’s far more revealing, surely, to see not where someone came from, but where they ended up.

And that’s fine: while we may think we want our stars to be just like us, the truth is we admire them not for their relatability, but their outsize talent, presence or indefinable X factor.

There’s a reason that a recreated Graceland, Elvis’s over-the-top Memphis mansion, is the star of Sofia Coppola’s recent Priscilla Presley biopic; the real thing still gets half a million visitors a year. Seeing the seventies splendour created by a star with access to all he ever wanted (an indoor waterfall and a TV room with three screens to watch at once, turns out) sheds far more light into the final state of mind of the king of rock’n’roll than his Mississippi birthplace ever could.

Or even Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s gloriously camp theme park complete with a replica of the one-bedroom log cabin where she grew up – a celebration of all things Americana that reveals much more about the queen of country’s outsize ambitions than the IRL cabin ever could. On a more sinister level, who could forget how Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, complete with personal fairground, encapsulated his retreat from reality into a fantasy land?

But the bakery where Harry Styles once slung bread rolls? All that will really tell you is just how far life has taken him since his TV talent contest. As Styles himself will know all too well: a few years ago, he revisited his former place of employment while filming the One Direction movie This Is Us. Just like old times, according to reports, but with “security, chauffeurs and minders outside”.

As every star knows, there’s no going home again post-fame – and, with the best will in the world, they’re in a place where fans can’t follow.