We’re driving through a tangle of Woking’s terraced streets with Nicky and Ann Weller, sister and mother respectively of Paul Weller, former “Ace Face” of British music legends, the Jam.

We pass a number of sites in the Surrey town that every Jam anorak (or in this case, parka) will recognise, by name at least.

“That used to be Michael’s,” Nicky says, nodding towards the former nightclub where the band were a resident turn before London and the world came calling.

I’m crooking my neck for a glimpse of Stanley Road, immortalised by Paul Weller in a 1995 solo homage to his former family home, but it turns out we’ve passed it.

It’s a rare privilege to be given a personal tour of the band’s origins courtesy of the family of the lead singer/songwriter, who along with Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums), made up the trio which pretty much owned the British charts from 1977 to 1982.

From this weekend, a unique perspective on the group will be available to all when an exhibition, About the Young Idea, opens at London’s Somerset House.

Fitting for a venue where the nation’s births deaths and marriages were registered, the display takes the visitor on a memorabilia­-filled, 11­-room journey which details the Jam’s triumphant story from first note to last.

Nicky tells me over tea and sandwiches at her mum’s quietly grand residence on the edge of town that it was “superfan” Den Davis who convinced her an exhibition was a good idea – although the band themselves weren’t so sure, as she explains: “They were like, ‘Really? You’re doing an exhibition at Somerset House? Who’s going to be interested in that? Why would anybody be interested all these years later?’”

Once committed to the project, Nicky and her team, which includes her long-­term partner, Russell Reader, had about five months to source enough Jam­-related gems to make a show.

She’s confident they’ve succeeded.

“It’s more like a museum piece,” she says, “a walk­through of their albums from In the City to The Gift on a journey which begins with the Jam at their height and goes right back to suburbia.”

During their 10-­year career the Jam’s dynamic brand of new wave/60s infused pop delivered 19 consecutive top 40 singles and six hit studio albums.

Tunes such as Going Underground and A Town Called Malice – two of four chart-­topping singles – remain imbedded in the nation’s musical psyche; soaring, three-minute anthems to the edgy political times and the band’s working class roots.

Despite their crisp, Carnaby Street-­inspired garb, in song and attitude, the Jam were fiercely anti­-establishment.

With that in mind, Nicky wondered if the band and their fans’ raucous aura might prove a little too incongruous for the exhibition venue’s sumptuous surrounds. “The rawness of the Jam going to Somerset House, this idyllic, beautiful building... I thought it was too posh for us,” she says.

“But I quite like the contrast – its chaos to couture.”

Jam aficionados will be melting in anticipation at the trove unearthed for the exhibition, designed to coincide with the band’s formation as a trio, from the four­-piece they had been 40 years ago.

There’s the entire backline from the final Brighton Centre show in 1982, stage suits, rare photos, never-­before­-seen concert footage and long-­lost recordings.

One of the most treasured items at the Somerset House exhibition was discovered in the most unlikely of places – Paul Weller’s shed.

Nicky says: “I dug out all his old school reports. But my favourite are his schoolbooks which say on the front ‘maths and English’ but are actually filled with poetry, songs he wrote with original Jam member Dave Waller and little drawings of scooters.”

Aged 52, five years her brother’s junior, Nicky was 14 when the Jam first charted in 1977.

She says: “Fans used to camp on the green outside our house. Mum would make them bacon sandwiches and cups of tea.

It was never like, ‘Off you go, you can’t be here’. Mum would be like, ‘Where are you sleeping tonight? Come on, you can have the sofa’.”

Nicky says being allowed to skip school for a trip to Top of the Pops or watch the band storm London’s thriving pub circuit while friends made do with Woking’s less salubrious night spots, were among the benefits of having a pop star brother.

There were downsides. She claims the Jam’s Top 10 dominance between 1980 and 1982 made her final school years a chore, to say the least.

She says: “I wasn’t liked. I think it was a bit of a jealousy thing, not that I was ever a show­-off.

"Yet I remember my French teacher absolutely loving the Jam and asking me to get a couple of singles signed, which was quite funny.”

Nicky, who lives in London with Russell and ran her brother’s website until the early 2000s,

“Paul said he would rather have had the money.”

About the Young Idea runs from Friday, June 26, to Monday, August 31, at Somerset House, The Strand, London WC2.

Visit: somersethouse.org.uk for tickets and opening times.