Following Sherlock Holmes around London

A Sherlock Holmes Walk around London 

At 221-B Baker Street, the most famous detective continues to live, enjoying celebrity status around the world.  Alighting in the Baker Street tube station, one will find his profile, pipe, cap and all, looking from the corner of his eye in the tiles that make up the station walls. Stepping outside, one sees the larger than life statue of the sleuth looking on at the passing traffic of Marylebone Road.

Japanese admirers of Holmes

When one follows the signs and reaches the museum at the most famous address of London, perhaps even with 10 Downing Street in contention, one sees a sign proclaiming the residence of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. If one pauses longer than a minute, his international reputation is bound to be revealed as the picture of this signboard is clicked by the Sonys, Fujis and Nikons of hundreds of Japanese tourists. Tickets to the museum are available from the Sherlock Holmes shop next door, which contains quaint collectibles – replicas of London double-decker buses, Sherlock Holmes busts and clocks, and free visiting cards of the detective.

The museum itself actually lies between numbers 237 and 241, but bears the number 221B. It is designed and maintained as Holmes and Watson may have lived in the late nineteenth century.  Sherlock Holmes’ hat hangs near the doorway, cloth caps and pipes lie on old tables, tea pots, books, magnifying glass, hour glass, violins, barometer, shoe brush, measuring tapes and ancient revolvers are scattered about on tables, show cases and walls. One also finds a knuckle duster and recreated paraphernalia from the canon.

There is also the stuffed mannequin of a Baker Street Irregular in the lobby.

The third floor is full of life size stuffed replicas of various characters of the novels, including Holmes, Watson, the man with the twisted lip, Irene Adler, Jabez Wilson and others. Another version of Dr. Watson sits in the sofa, and I notice him to be an animated mannequin who moves his eyes over the pages of a notebook. When I look back at him, he smiles and says, “Hello, I am Dr. Watson.” A nice touch.

Site of the Empty House

Coming out of Baker Street and walking south, one crosses the Merylebone Road and comes in front of 118 Baker Street, currently next to a Travel Agency. It is the location of the Camden House, an empty building opposite the Baker Street residence of Holmes and Watson, where they wait to surprise Colonel Sebastian Moran in The Empty House.

Walking further east, through the Manchester Square, brings us to the intersection of Bentinck Street and Welbeck Street, where Holmes is almost run over by a van driven by Moriarty’s men in The Final Problem.

Welbeck and Queens

Turning right at Welbeck Street, we reach Queen Anne Street, where Watson takes rooms after moving out of Baker Street lodgings in The Illustrious Client.

Langham Hotel

Heading east, after a while, we reach the Langham Hotel at Portland Place. It was here in this lavish hotel that Sir Arthur had received the commission for writing The Sign of Four. He uses the same location as the place where Captain Morstan stays in the novel. There are other Holmes characters who stay in the same hotel – the King of Bohemia in A Scandal in Bohemia and the Hon. Philip Green in The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax. The hotel stands on Regent Street.

Scaffolding on Regent Street

Regent Street is where in The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes notices a can following Sir Henry Baskerville. The cabman later reveals that the pursuer had given his name as Mr. Sherlock Holmes.One can next walk south down Regent street for around 20 minutes, enjoying the bustle an crowd and shopper’s splendour. Alternatively one can take Bus 12 or the Bakerloo Line tube to Picadilly Circus. Either way, one reaches 68 Regent Street, the site of Cafe Royal, in front of which Holmes is nearly killed by two men armed with sticks in The Illustrious Client. The two assailants escape by making their way through the establishment.  The problem with London at the moment is that as part of a beautification project gearing it up for 2012 Olympics, most of it is under scaffolding. So, this site may be hidden from the most incisive of investigative eyes.

The Critierion

However, a small distance ahead, at Piccadilly, we come to the Criterion theatre. In the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, Watson is having a drink in this plush bar of Picadilly Circus when he bumps into young Stamford, and is told that a gentleman named Sherlock Holmes, a rather strange type, is looking for someone to share a room.

Further south, we come to The London Library in St James Square, where Watson ventures to get hold of a goodly volume on Chinese pottery to help Holmes entrap Baron Gruner in The Illustrious Client.

Entrance to
the Athenaeum

Approaching Pall Mall, one comes across the Athenaeum, perhaps the inspiration behind the Diogenes Club, frequented by his gifted but laid back brother Mycroft.  Holmes meets Mycroft in The Greek Interpreter and tells Watson that his brother is “one of the queerest men” whose deductive powers far exceed his.

Going down towards the Mall, we cross the Duke of York Steps. In His Last Bow,  Baron Von Herling and Von Bork discuss getting a signal book through the ‘little door on the Duke of York steps’.

Turning left past the ICA and heading along the Mall, we soon reach the Arch of Admiralty, which was ‘buzzing like an overturned beehive’ after the theft of the top secret submarine documents, the Bruce-Partington Plans.

From there to the Scotland Yard headquarters of the Metropolitan Police is a short walk. When first mentioned in the Holmes stories, they were based in the alleyway Great Scotland Yard, having since relocated to St. James Park.

At 16 Whitehall, when one comes back towards Charing Cross, stands the Lord of the Moon Mall. Earlier, it had been the Cox and Co., in whose vaults there was the travel worn and battered tin dispatch-box with John Watson painted upon the lid in Thor Bridge. Watson also kept the papers that record the Holmes cases in the box.

Further ahead, Charing Cross is the station from where almost all fictional characters have boarded trains to distant parts of England, Holmes and Watson are no exception. They take a Charing Cross train for Marsham in The Abbey Grange and for Chatham in The Golden Pince-Nez.However, in a rare bout of self criticism, Holmes declares in The Man with the Twisted Lip that he ought to be kicked from Neville St Clair’s home at Lee in Kent to Charing Cross for his unpardonable tardiness in thinking out the solution to the case. Irene Adler sets out from here on the 5.15 to the continent after outwitting the King of Bohemia and Holmes himself. In The Second Stain ‘a woman answering to the description of’ the Creole Mme Fournaye ‘attracted much attention at Charing Cross station by the wildness of her appearance and the violence of her gestures.’

However, what remains a mystery is why Mathews ‘knocks out the detective’s left canine in the waiting room of Charing Cross’ since it is made known to us only as an aside while Holmes researches villains with names starting with M in The Empty House.

On the Strand by the Charing Cross station also stood the Site of the American Exchange. In A Study in Scarlet, the police found two letters from the Guion Steamship Co., ‘one addressed to E.J. Drebber and one to Joseph Stangerson’ address American Express Strand. This used to be a kiosk outside the station, which Americans in London could use as a postal address. It is outside the station by the Exchange that in The Illustrious Client Watson catches a glimpse of the shocking headline on the newspaper being displayed by the one legged news vendor –‘Murderous attack on Sherlock Holmes’.

On the Strand at Charing Cross Station stands the Charing Cross Hotel, where Holmes sets a trap in the smoking room for Oberstein, the spy in The Bruce-Partington Plans, and prevents the top secret submarine papers from falling into enemy hands.

Behind the Charing Cross, at Northumberland Street at Craven Passage, there stands The Sherlock Holmes, a pub whose walls are full of memorabilia of the detective, including brier pipes and bent poker sticks.  There is also superb cuttings of a group of American men in the semaphoric positions of the characters in The Dancing Men welcoming Conan Doyle to a stateside town.  Upstairs there is a life size reconstruction of the sitting room of Holmes and Watson in Baker Street. Some even say that the pub, formerly Northumberland Arms, is actually the Northumberland Hotel where Sir Henry Baskerville stays in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Behind this establishment stood a century ago Neville’s Turkish Baths, which Holmes and Watson visit at the start of The Illustrious Client, the date mentioned as 3^rd September, 1902.

Coming back to Strand, we can extrapolate the site of the Charing Cross Post Office at no. 457. In Wisteria Lodge, John Scott Eccles makes himself known to Holmes by sending a telegram from this Post Office. Inspector Gregson finds Eccles by tracing the telegram to the old post office.

Walking ahead, the Craven Street cuts in. 43-46 of this street housed the Craven Family Hotel, based on which, in all probability, Conan Doyle wrote of the fictitious Mexborough Private Hotel, where Stapleton keeps his wife a prisoner in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

 Opposite the Charing Cross Station on the Strand, Watson dashes out of a cab through Lowther shopping arcade and into another cab on the other side as part of an elaborate getaway route during Holmes’s escape from Moriarty’s gang in The Final Problem. Lowther was demolished in 1904 and a branch of Coutt’s Bank has since been built on the site.

Walking east along Strand, we come to Agar Street at Chandos Place, which was the site of Charing Cross Hospital. On Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick, which he left at 221B Baker Street at the beginning of The Hound of the Baskervilles, is inscribed ‘from his friends of the CCH’. Holmes is also taken to the same hospital after being attacked outside the Cafe Royal in The Illustrious Client.

Further ahead, on Wellington Street, we come across the Lyceum Theatre, currently showing the spectacular stage version of Lion King. The future Mrs. Watson, Mary Morstan, meets an agent for the Sholtos, who have been sending her jewels from her late father’s treasure in The Sign of Four. A slight mix up of the dates of the appointment by Conan Doyle resulted in a four wheeler driving Morstan, Holmes and Watson from Wellington Street to Sholto’s Brixton villa through Rochester Row and Vincent Square, Westminster,  instead of straight over Waterloo Bridge.

It is from the aforementioned Waterloo Bridge that John Openshaw drowns in the water, probably murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, in The Five Orange Pips – a tragedy which, arguably, is Holmes’s single greatest failure.

Poppin's Court

As we merge onto Fleet Street, we spot Poppin’s Court. The Red Haired League’s ginger haired pawnbroker Jabez Wilson sat in an office in Pope’s Court, copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica for the then grand sum of four pounds a week. Pope’s court was possibly based on Poppin’s Court.

Further ahead, heading east to Old Bailey and then Northwards, we come to Giltspur Street. Ahead of us stands Bart’s, or St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Dr. Watson meets Sherlock Holmes for the first time in a chemical laboratory in the first story involving the detective The Sign of Four. A plaque on the wall of the curator’s room adjoining the hospital’s pathology lab claims that Holmes’s first words to Watson had been, “How are you? ... You had been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” This is more like the great detective and sticks to the memory, but the fact of fiction is that Holmes has already said to both Watson and Stamford, “I’ve found it, I’ve found it. I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin and by nothing else.” However, despite all the euphoria and excitement, the finding is never referred to again.

Restricted to a small part of London notwithstanding, it becomes a long, long walk ... from his established home in Baker Street to the arrival of Holmes on the scene – at the Bartholomew Hospital. And it is a wonderful way to see parts of London on foot.

Plum's England

Sharing the actual premises of Strand and fictional ones at Simpsons-on-the-Strand with Sherlock Holmes, P.G.Wodehouse’s association with London is more varied.

Location of the Hongkong Shanghai Bank

Before becoming one of the mainstays of Strand for 35 years, he started his career as a clerk in Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at GraceChurch Street in the City.

Every morning, if his recollections are to be believed, Wodehouse used to run from his Chelsea lodgings to the bank, and as he neared Gracechurch Street, would speed up and charge flat through the entrance doors and up the stairs, cheered on by groups of clerks, so that he could clock in on time and save his bonus. He recalled that this kept him in excellent condition.

 His departure was nowhere near the sporting excellence that his daily entrances were. It seems he had torn off a page from the new ledger to write one of his short stories, and admitted to the crime. He may have got away with the misdeed, but, after the head cashier had accused the head stationer of supplying defective materials, the latter replied that only an imbecile would tear out the first page of a ledger. And it was then, after a moment’s thought, the cashier realised that he did have such an imbecile working under him – Wodehouse. The culprit was summoned and interrogated and admitted the blame. Wodehouse later certified himself as the ‘worst bungler ever to have entered the portals of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.’ The experiences did, however, account for a lot of what makes up the novel Psmith in the City.

Berkeley Square

However, the ruined career in finance perhaps left too deep a mark in young Wodehouse’s mind to spend too many words on the working of financial institutions other than a passing reference of the stenographers jotting down the dictation of millionaire go-getters in the form of streptococcus and impressionist sketches of pneumonia germs.

His Jeeves and Wooster capers are centred around the Mayfair area, before they leave the crowded city for the country houses holding various ghastly girls and to be purloined silverware. Betram Wooster resides in the fictitious Berkeley Mansions on Berkeley Street. One can imagine him tottering back from Drones through the square late at night, the world in a blurry haze till Jeeves comes in with the restorative the next morning.

Buck's - the inspiration for Drones

However, after the pick me up, and a quick earful of ‘A telegram from Mrs. Gregson, sir,’ from Jeeves, he would trot down – a or bolt for cover depending on the nature of the missive – along Hay Hill, Grafton Street, New Bond Street and into Clifford Street. Here at number 18 stands Buck, the gentleman’s club. According to many, it is the blueprint based on which P.G.Wodehouse put together his masonry of unparalleled imagination to create the Drones Club teeming with Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, with Pongo Twistleton, Freddie Widgeon, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps and Tuppy Glossop.

However, different landmarks all over London were frequently used for different incredible ways in which the young men of his novels got into trouble.

Bertie receives a reprimand and fine from magistrate Watkyn Basset for pinching a policeman’s helmet in Leicester Square (currently under scaffolding for the 2012 Olympics preparation) on a boat race night in the Code of the Woosters. Egged on by Catsmeat Potter Pirbright, Gussie Fink Nottle wades into Trafalgar Square fountains and is sentenced to fourteen days in jail in The Mating Season. There are numerous occasions when the fiancé is spotted with another girl, peers with chorus girls, sons of earls with seedy professional men in numerous books in lots of lots of nooks and corners around the city. Trains are taken from Paddington, Charing Cross, King’s Cross. The Theatre district is always buzzing with playwrights, actors, conmen, lyricists – all of whom contrive to come together and create one hilarious caper after another.

However, there are occasions when the great humorist tires of the city and moves to the outskirts.

His happiest days were probably passed in Dulwich College, where as a fit, carefree youth, he wrote stories, while playing cricket and golf to his heart’s content. It is not surprising that he sets the beautiful suburb of Valley Fields, a recurring location of some novels, based on Dulwich Village.

He also goes as far as Clapham, where in his early 1909 novel Mike, Psmith and Mike Jackson are invited to the Clapham Common home of the left-winger Mr. Waller.

However, the crowded cities with the curious and often realistic characters skewed and stretched by the humorist’s type writer, held only a limited appeal for him.  He often wrote of New York too, with the world of musical comedies, dancing girls, struggling writers, actors, the archetypical millionaires and away from home English gentlemen lighting up many a ditty. But, the most heavenly light of language and lyrics shone through when the action shifted to the English countryside. Be it Blandings, Brinkley Manor, Totleigh Towers or standalone castles of solitary novels – Beevor and others – he took us to the original gardens of Eden where man had not yet bitten into the forbidden fruit.

Whenever we close our eyes and reflect about P.G.Wodehouse novels and stories set in the lush green countryside –always in the height of summer unless the plot demanded cabinet ministers to be marooned in swan infested islands during pouring rain –there is one image that lovingly comes to mind. A muddle headed elderly earl pottering about in his garden, dressed in corduroy trousers and patches on his sleeves, arguing about the exact amount of fertiliser needed for his roses with his Scottish gardener. Near at hand is the beloved expanse of the prize winning sow, the star contender for the next year’s title of the Shropshire Fat Pigs contest.  

Lord Emsworth is so well known and adorable it is not difficult to make out his form, leaning over the fence as the train rushes by the English country side.

What tends to be surprising is that the actual Emsworth village is not the setting for Blandings.

As a young man, he was working for the Globe when he met Herbert Westbrook, a schoolmaster in the Emsworth village of Hampshire. On his invitation, he took the train down to Emsworth and liked it. Eventually, he found the place to be ideal for writing and took a job as an assistant master in the Emsworth House School, who would work with the boys at cricket.

In the cricket novel, Mike, the hero is asked which school he has been to. And he answers, “A private school in Hampshire at a place called Emsworth.”

Site of the old school

P.G.Wodehouse lived in Emsworth in long and short periods, in fits and starts, even when he was travelling regularly to the United States. His last visit to the town was probably in 1929. His mind had soaked up the names around Emsworth like a sponge and they delightfully appear all over his works.

Threepwood House

He purchased and lived in the Threepwood House, which still stands in the Record Road. Lord Emsworth’s family name is Threepwood in the Blandings canon. Galahad Threepwood is one of the most resourceful bounders in English Literature. The Emsworth House has been demolished, but the ground still stands. Opposite to the school grounds is a small byway by the name of Beach Road. 

As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht.

Emsworth Museum

All around Emsworth are places with so familiar to us who are in love with his canon – Fittleworth, Worplesdon, Clarence Pier, Southbourne, Hayley, Bosham, Chicester, Havant, Wickham, Southwick, Deverill Hall, Arundel,Bognor, Stockheath, Warblington.

There is a quaint museum in the town, with collection of artifacts dealing with the seafaring families of Emsworth. However, there is a delightful little corner dealing with the writer and his connection with the place.

Blandings Castle, as noted earlier, is not located in Emsworth. There have been many conjectures about the actual location of the castle that inspired Blandings.

Map showing places with
 Wodehousean names around Emsworth

In 1987, Norman Murphy in his In Search of Blandings looked at a whole range of criteria based around architecture and landscape features of different castles all over England. His main suggestions were Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire for the castle itself, and Weston Park, Staffordshire for the gardens. The owners of Sudeley, also the resting place of Queen Katherine Parr, have since emphasised the Wodehouse connection.

In 1999, Norman Murphy again suggested Hunstanton Hall in Norfolk, the home of the LeStrange family from 1137 to 1954, where Wodehouse visited in the 1920s, as inspiration for Blandings, its master, and "the real Empress of Blandings".

In 2003, Dr Daryl Lloyd and Dr Ian Greatbatch, two researchers in the Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, made use of a Geographic Information System to analyse a set of geographical criteria, such as a viewshed analysis of The Wrekin and drive time from Shrewsbury. Their final conclusion was that Apley Hall in Stockton, Bridgnorth, Shropshire was the best suited location for fulfilling the geographical criteria.

Apley Hall - Blandings?

Whatever the reality, the place of Blandings is in our hearts and souls, for us to revel in ever and ever as he created musical comedies with words that were set in the sprawling fields around the castle.

In Little Nugget, the school depicted is the actual Emsworth House and he describes its setting at the beginning of Chapter 2.

The real Marshmoreton Arms

The slightly peculiar fact is that when he did use the location of Emsworth for a novel, he called it Belpher, the location of A Damsel in Distress. There in the High Street stands The Crown, the unmistakable model for the Marshmoreton Arms in the novel.  It is described in the book as a comfortable, respectable hostelry catering for the village plutocrats.

Belpher (Emsworth) Waterfront

The foreshore harbour that the town ends up in is almost brought to life by the master. Herein I intend to show that not only did his works create music for the soul, there was perhaps a hint of satire of human emotions and social commentary – very, very subtle – which is overlooked because of the overwhelming image of Wodehouse as the writer of comic fiction.

The oyster industry of Emsworth was the envy of every fishing community in England at the end of the 19^th century, and overnight it was destroyed by oysters being infected with typhoid and causing illness and death. Here is what Wodehouse wrote in A Damsel in Distress about Belpher.

Belpher, in addition to all the advantages of the usual village, has a quiet charm all its own, due to the fact that it has seen better days. In a sense, it is a ruin, and ruins are always soothing to the bruised soul. Ten years before, Belpher had been a flourishing centre of the South of England oyster trade. It is situated by the shore, where Hayling Island, lying athwart the mouth of the bay, forms the waters into a sort of brackish lagoon, in much the same way as Fire Island shuts off the Great South Bay of Long Island from the waves of the Atlantic. The water of Belpher Creek is shallow even in high tide, and when the tide runs out, it leaves glistening mud flats, which is taste of the oysters to prefer to any other habitation. For years the Belpher oysters had been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, the Carlton and Romano’s. Dukes doted on them, chorus girls wept if they were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour, somebody discovered that what made the Belpher oyster so particularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted, lunched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is but a thin line of popular homage and execration. We see it in the case of politicians, generals and prize-fighters, and oysters are no exceptions to the rule. There was a typhoid scare – quite in passing and unjustified scare, but strong enough to do its deadly work; and almost overnight Belpher passed from a place of flourishing industry to the sleepy, by-the-world-forgotten spot which it was when George Bevan discovered it. The shallow water was still there; the mud is still there; even the oyster-beds are still there; but not the oysters nor the little world of activity which had sprung up around them. The glory of Belpher is dead; and over its gates Ichabod is written. But, if it has lost in importance, it has gained in charm; and George, for one, had no regrets. To him, in his present state of mental upheaval, Belpher was the ideal spot. 

Wodehouse collection at Emsworth Museum