The funny thing about 221B Baker Street is that it was a fictitious place, an upstairs flat nestled into the foggy, smoggy, noisy streets of London, but because it was set on a real street and many of Doyle’s travelling directions and descriptions are correct from this point it has become real after the fact (when Doyle first used the address Baker Street was only numbered up to 100 and most of the original buildings were bombed in the blitz.). But then where better to put a Sherlock Holmes Museum? It’s just interesting that Doyle chose an almost real address.

The museum is done up to look like the rooms Holmes and Watson shared, complete with chemical experiments, violin stand and music, deerstalker on the hat stand, medical books and bullet holes in the walls. It’s cute but it’s cute done very well.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first London address was actually on Montague Place near the British Museum and in the early Holmes books, Holmes lives just around the corner on slightly less prestigious Georgian terrace, Montague Street. Doyle later moved to Tennison Road, Norwood (you can walk by and see the blue plaque.).

Doyle used real London landmarks in his books, The Grand Hotel, The Museum Tavern, The Langham Hotel and Scotland Yard are all faithfully described. With much of the original audience living in London it must have really brought the stories to life to be reading about places you knew (once again we can’t properly imagine that now everything is imagined for us by television.).

Sherlock Holmes Museum.

Written by  Sophie Edgerton.

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Meet Watson in person...

Very true, it's cute - a 'theme-museum' - but there are also lots of original manuscripts and some of Conan Doyle's belongings, and there's a fantastic guy who spends all day being Watson in the little first floor drawing room. Ask him anything about the place or the stories and he'll answer you accurately, and in character... What a top chap!

 

Review posted 1st October 2008 by larapiegeler.

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