I think Menlove Avenue has an important place in Beatles history

Yoko Ono

At one stage, a private foreign company was understood to have been showing an interest in the property.

Lennon wrote the early Beatles hit Please Please Me at Menlove Avenue.

His teenage band, The Quarrymen, and then The Beatles, rehearsed there.

Ono gave her backing to a campaign to save the building when she visited Lennon's old school, Dovedale Primary, last year and received an honorary degree from Liverpool University.

She worked anonymously through a third party to secure the property, which she said she was "thrilled" to have acquired.

The words of the poster come from Lennon's song Imagine

"I think Menlove Avenue has an important place in Beatles history, and it saddened me to think that it might be lost.

"The fact that this is happening in the same week that Liverpool airport is officially opened as Liverpool John Lennon airport would have made my husband very happy," she said.

Lennon once described the house as "a nice, semi-detached place with a small garden".

He wrote about a donation to the National Trust in his song Happiness is a Warm Gun on the 1968 "white" album.

The song mentions "a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust".

Ono is due to meet the Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Booth, on Friday in Liverpool to unveil a statue of Lennon at the renamed airport.