London Sherlock Holmes Audio Walking Tour (Self-Guided)

Sherlock Holmes has lived three lives in London. There is the one Arthur Conan Doyle wrote for him, starting in 1887. There is the one the world added afterward, with a hat and a pipe Doyle never quite gave him. And there is the one the BBC gave him in 2010, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman as John Watson. This walk follows all three, and the man in the middle of them: a young doctor sitting in an empty consulting room, waiting for patients who never came, writing instead. You start at the most famous address in fiction, 221B Baker Street, an address that did not exist when Holmes moved in. You end at the black door that played 221B on television. In between, the story jumps back and forth in time, and you'll hear clearly each time it does. This is an unofficial walk, not made with or endorsed by the BBC, the show's producers or the Conan Doyle estate. It's one of our self-guided walking tours, about 5.2 kilometers from Baker Street to North Gower Street.

Before you set off

The walking takes about 73 minutes for 5.2 kilometers, so with stops allow around two hours. The route is flat and paved all the way. The longest stretch is the walk from the Langham into Bloomsbury, through the side streets of Fitzrovia. Baker Street station is a few minutes from the start, and you finish close to Euston Square and Warren Street stations, with Euston a little farther on.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum charges for entry and keeps daytime hours, so check prices and times before you go if you'd like to step inside. Speedy's, the café at the end, keeps early, short hours and closes on Sundays, so check those too. Several stops are working buildings: a dental clinic, a hotel, private flats and a café with homes above it. Look from the sidewalk, keep doorways clear and don't knock.

221B Baker Street

You're outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Look for the Georgian townhouse with the blue plaque that reads 221B, and the doorman in a London bobby's uniform.

In A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, Dr. John Watson meets Holmes and agrees to share lodgings with him. He tells us the rooms "consisted of a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows." Four years later, in A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes shows Watson the difference between looking and noticing, using the stairs up to those rooms. "I know that there are seventeen steps," Holmes says, "because I have both seen and observed."

Here is the twist. When Doyle wrote those words, there was no number 221 on Baker Street. The street simply didn't run that high. The numbers above 200 only arrived in the 1930s, when Baker Street was extended over what had been Upper Baker Street. So where did 221 land when it finally existed? Not here. It went to a big new office building a few doors south, called Abbey House, built in 1932 for the Abbey Road Building Society, which later became Abbey National. Abbey House was given the numbers 215 to 229, and 221 was one of them.

Then the letters started coming. People wrote to Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street, and they arrived at the building society. Abbey National ended up employing a secretary whose job was to answer them.

This house is older than any of that. It was built in 1815 and spent many years as a lodging house. The museum opened here in 1990. Its true place on the street is between number 237 and number 241, and it carries the famous number by permission.

Walk south down Baker Street, on this side, and you'll pass Abbey House on the way: look for its Art Deco clock tower. Keep going to the big crossroads with Marylebone Road, turn left, and the statue stands outside Baker Street station. About four minutes.

Sherlock Holmes statue

You're beside the Sherlock Holmes statue, outside the Marylebone Road entrance to Baker Street station. He stands about three meters tall in bronze, wrapped in a long Inverness cape, with a deerstalker hat on his head and a pipe in his hand. This is the Holmes everybody pictures. The sculptor was John Doubleday, and the statue was unveiled on the 23rd of September, 1999.

Now walk around to the plinth and read the inscription. It says that 221b Baker Street "is at the original headquarters of Abbey National plc." That's the building you just passed. The Sherlock Holmes Society of London commissioned this statue and Abbey National paid for it, and the company that answered Holmes's mail made sure the plinth said where his address had landed.

Look at the hat. Doyle never wrote the word deerstalker. The closest he comes is in Silver Blaze, from 1892, where Holmes sets out in "his ear-flapped travelling-cap." The deerstalker came from the illustrator Sidney Paget, who drew Holmes for the stories, and it stuck so firmly that now it is Holmes.

The pipe is the same kind of story. The big curved pipe in this statue's hand is an image added after the text, and people still argue about who first gave it to him.

And while you're here, one more thing Doyle never wrote: the line "Elementary, my dear Watson." It is not in any of his stories. The words turn up separately, but never together in that famous phrase.

To find the man who built him, we jump to the spring of 1891. Carry on east along Marylebone Road, then turn right into Devonshire Place and follow it south. Across Devonshire Street it becomes Upper Wimpole Street; keep going almost to its far end, by Weymouth Street. About eleven minutes.

Conan Doyle's consulting room

You're in the doctors' quarter of London, on Upper Wimpole Street, near its corner with Weymouth Street. Look for the Georgian corner house, a dental clinic today, and a green plaque on its wall. It reads "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author, 1859 to 1930, worked and wrote here in 1891." The plaque gives the address as 2 Upper Wimpole Street. Some accounts put the room on Devonshire Place instead, just up the road, so let's simply say: in this little stretch of street.

It's the spring of 1891. Doyle is a doctor, and he has just come back from Vienna, where he studied medicine of the eye. He sets himself up here as an eye specialist, in the heart of the doctors' quarter. And nobody comes.

He described it himself, years later, in his memoir. Every morning he walked from his lodgings in Montague Place, arrived at his consulting room at ten, and sat there until three or four, "with never a ring to disturb my serenity." Picture it: a waiting room with no one waiting, and a young man with a pen. In those empty hours Doyle began the short stories that made Holmes famous.

Then, in May of 1891, Doyle was struck down by a severe bout of influenza. When he recovered, he made his choice. He gave up medicine and became a writer.

Doyle didn't forget these streets, either. In The Blue Carbuncle, on a freezing night, Holmes and Watson set off on foot, and Watson tells us "we swung through the doctors' quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into Oxford Street." They pass within a few hundred meters of where you're standing.

But to see how Holmes got his second chance, we need to go back two more years, to a dinner in 1889. Head east along Weymouth Street to Portland Place, the broad avenue a few blocks over, and turn right down it to the grand hotel at its southern end. About eight minutes.