Read the Places

The London of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

From the rooms at 221B Baker Street, the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson take on the twelve cases of the first collection, from a scandal in Bohemia to a speckled band, reading the whole gaslit city and the counties beyond it in a scratch, a splash of mud, a frayed cuff. Doyle maps a real Victorian London: the Baker Street lodgings, Scotland Yard on the river, the Strand where clients arrive, the dark East End of the opium dens, and the country houses where the darkest cases lie.

Author
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892
Places
5

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The lodgings0% in
Holmes

221B Baker Street

The lodgings

Map of 221B Baker Street today
London today

The sitting room at 221B, with its Persian slipper of tobacco and its cases arriving by the morning post, is the still centre from which every adventure begins. Doyle makes the Baker Street lodgings one of the most famous rooms in fiction, the place where Watson watches Holmes read a stranger's whole life from the state of his boots.

Throughout

inspired byHolmes and Watson's rooms at 221B Baker Street are the fictional address at the heart of the stories; Baker Street is real and the lodgings are sited there.

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The police25% in
Lestrade

Scotland Yard

The police

Map of Scotland Yard today
London today

At Scotland Yard the professional detectives, Lestrade foremost, plod through the cases Holmes solves at a glance, and grudgingly call him in when they are beaten. Doyle sets the amateur's brilliance against the official force by the river, the Yard forever a step behind the reasoning machine of Baker Street.

The police-procedural threads

explicitScotland Yard, the real headquarters of the Metropolitan Police by the Thames, is where the official detectives such as Lestrade work; sited there.

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The clients50% in
Irene Adler

The Strand

The clients

Map of The Strand today
London today

Through the West End's bustle come the clients with their troubles, among them the King of Bohemia and, outwitting Holmes himself, the singular Irene Adler, forever after 'the woman'. Doyle fills the Strand and its theatres and lodging-houses with the human traffic of a great city, each passer-by a case waiting to be read.

A Scandal in Bohemia and others

explicitThe Strand and the surrounding West End, the real thoroughfare of Victorian London, is where clients and cases converge on Holmes; sited there.

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The underworld75% in
Watson

The East End

The underworld

Map of The East End today
London today

Into the opium dens and grimy courts of the East End Watson ventures on the trail of a lost man, and finds Holmes in disguise among the wreckage of the docks. Doyle turns the city's poorest quarter into a place of transformation and hidden lives, where a respectable gentleman may vanish into a beggar and back.

The Man with the Twisted Lip

inferredThe opium dens and riverside slums of the East End, drawn from the real Victorian docklands, are the setting of the darker cases such as The Man with the Twisted Lip; sited there.

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Beyond London100% in
Holmes

The country houses

Beyond London

Map of The country houses today
London today

The train carries Holmes out to lonely country houses where, he observes, worse crimes hide than in the vilest London alley, from the sinister Stoke Moran of the speckled band to the copper beeches. Doyle sets against the readable city a countryside of isolated halls, where old money and old menace fester behind respectable walls.

The Speckled Band and others

inspired bySeveral cases carry Holmes into the home counties, to houses such as Stoke Moran in Surrey; drawn from the real countryside south of London and sited beyond the city.

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