This feature first appeared in February 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
No fictional character is so intimately associated with London. The very name of Sherlock Holmes conjures swirling fog to the imagination. How many non-existent people have their own museum, pub and statue? But just how big a role does the Victorian city really play in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle? Which bits of London — besides Baker Street — does the detective visit most often? I determined to find out by reading all 60 stories and mapping every named location. You know my methods, Watson…
“It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.”
So states Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League. The Master Detective claims to be an accomplished orienteer, able to navigate the wharves and slums of London as ably as the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s. He can prove it, too.
In a thrilling passage in The Sign of Four, Holmes and Watson plunge through the foggy streets of Pimlico in a four-wheeler. "I lost my bearings,” admits Dr Watson, “and knew nothing, save that we seemed to be going a very long way. Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets. "Rochester Row," said he. "Now Vincent Square. Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road. We are making for the Surrey side, apparently."
Holmes’s knowledge of London may have been exact, but his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, and his narrator (usually Doctor John Watson) are not so fastidious. Across the four novels and 56 short stories that comprise “The Canon”, we are presented with an impressionistic London; one made up of snatches and snapshots of streetscape, sometimes spelled out in detail, other times vague or contradictory. This geographical nonchalance is at odds with reputation. Sherlock Holmes is intimately associated with late Victorian London. But just how “Londony” are the stories?
I set off to my bookshelf to find out. Mapping Holmes meant re-reading every one of the 60 stories — an absolute pleasure, of course, but a time-consuming one. As I went along, I added annotated pins to a Google map every time London locations were mentioned, building up a complete picture of everywhere in the city visited or mentioned in the text.
This was a few years ago now. But I thought it would be fun to revive the project for Londonist: Time Machine readers. And so, I present a new representation of the data, in the form of the Sherlock Holmes Geobibliome…
The Holmesian Geobibliome
The idea is that we see most clearly the bits of town the author favours, and most crucially (in the white space) see which areas he does not write about.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been up to this kind of wheeze before. I’ve previously mapped every location in Charles Dickens novels and, on the non-fictional side, done the same for every place mentioned in Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. There is no existing word for this kind of map — and I do so like making up silly words — so I’ve called them geobibliomes.
A dive into the detail
So what can we make of Holmes’s London? Well, there’s a clear central axis from Baker Street and Marylebone down through Mayfair to the clubs of St James’s (haunt of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft Holmes), and on to Charing Cross. Perhaps half the locations from the canon fall within this strip. This is no surprise. The area includes London’s more well-to-do areas, the sorts of places where you might expect to find the various Lords, Ladies and Knights of the Realm who make up much of Holmes’s client base.
In contrast to Dickens, Conan Doyle shies away from the West End. Leicester Square is never mentioned. Soho features only in a fleeting glimpse of Glasshouse Street. Most surprising of all, Piccadilly gets zero attention (although the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus plays a crucial role — see later).
One thing I discovered when mapping Dickens is that he never once mentions Buckingham Palace in any of his novels. This is true also of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories. It’s a bit odd, as both authors have lots to say about class, nobility and the higher echelons of society — but I guess it was safest to keep her Majesty out of sordid tales of crime and deceit. On the other hand, Sherlock makes much use of London’s rail termini, whereas Dickens never mentions a single one in any of his major works. (I’m still quite proud of discovering that nugget.)
Another place where Conan Doyle gets more points than Dickens is south London. Like, proper south London. Dickens spends a fair bit of time in Borough and sets the climax of Oliver Twist in the Bermondsey slums, but he rarely strays far from the river. Holmes and Watson, by contrast, gamely venture to Brixton, Camberwell, Lambeth, Kennington and Peckham on numerous occasions. The duo go deeper still. Croydon, Penge, Beckenham… not many authors give those a spin. The reason is not hard to deduce. Conan Doyle’s very best short stories were written between 1891 and 1893 when he was living in Tennison Road, South Norwood. He was a proper south Londoner (if briefly) and even put his ‘hood into the title of a short-story: The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.
By contrast, forays into north London are refreshingly rare. Hampstead features heavily in several stories, but otherwise our sleuthing pair seem reluctant to cross the Marylebone Road. Similarly, when the pair head out into the countryside, they use the southern stations of Charing Cross and Waterloo on a combined total of 16 occasions, while King's Cross and Euston to the north are only blessed with the detective's patronage on four occasions. I like that rare southern focus.
It’s also interesting to note how little of the East End makes it into the Holmes Canon. The area was well known by reputation for its crushing poverty, and the crime and vice that ran alongside. Holmes has nothing to do with it, preferring cases in more well-to-do areas. Even when he does venture east to visit an opium den, he finds it within the bounds of the Square Mile rather than, say, Limehouse which is the usual literary go-to area for such houses. There is no Whitechapel in Sherlock Holmes; no Bethnal Green, Mile End, Shoreditch, Spitalfields, Hackney. The detective would surely have found much of interest in these regions, but they would have likely been outside of Conan Doyle’s immediate experience.
On the trail of Sherlock Holmes
For readers in the London area, or those planning a visit, I’ve also included numerous places of Sherlockian interest you might like to track down. These are highlighted on the map with purple borders and text.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum is undoubtedly the most famous. It can be found — where else? — at 221b Baker Street, although it’s a bit of a fudge as the neighbours are at numbers 237 and 241. This is not so much a museum as a visitor attraction stuffed with dummies and props from the stories — best summed up as ‘elementary’.
The Sherlock Holmes pub in Charing Cross offers another glimpse into Holmes’s study but, this time, for free. Head upstairs to the dining room where you can see an exceptionally detailed full-size diorama, salvaged from the 1951 Festival of Britain. Nice pub, too.
Conan Doyle’s three London addresses are also marked on the map. His home in Bloomsbury was long ago swallowed up by the University of London buildings around Senate House, but there’s a plaque to find on his old Marylebone surgery, and another on his suburban house out in South Norwood.
London holds several further plaques to the writer and his most famous creation. The Langham Hotel just north of Oxford Circus occupies a momentous position in the history of literature. It was here that editor JM Stoddart commissioned Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four at the same meal. Now that’s a power lunch.
Elsewhere, the former Criterion restaurant on Piccadilly Circus carries a plaque (inside) to commemorate the place where Watson first heard tell of Mr Holmes [Update: this has reportedly been taken down]. And then another in Bart’s Hospital Museum notes the first meeting between the duo.
I’ve also highlighted a couple of locations from the splendid BBC Sherlock series, where to find the statue, and a little-known representation of the detective on a Shaftesbury Avenue cinema. Happy sleuthing!
