221B Baker Street

221B Baker Street is the fictional London residence of the detective Sherlock Holmes, created by author Arthur Conan Doyle. The address could indicate an upstairs apartment of a residential house on what was originally a Georgian terrace. The B of the address might, however, refer to the whole house. The street is considerably wider than is portrayed in some film versions of Holmes's adventures and is a substantial and busy north-south thoroughfare, which is at least as congested now as it would have been in Holmes's day. The site of the house — had it ever existed — would have been at the north end of Baker Street on the west side, near Regent's Park and Baker Street tube station. This justifies the claim of the Sherlock Holmes Museum that they occupy the real location of 221b Baker Street. We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. (Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 1887) The 'real' 221B Baker Street The street number 221B has never been assigned to any property in Baker Street. In Sherlock Holmes's time, street numbers in Baker Street only went up to No 100, which was presumably why Conan Doyle chose the fictional number. The part now encompassing 221 Baker Street was known in Doyle's lifetime as Upper Baker Street, and in the first manuscript, Doyle put Holmes's home in "Upper Baker Street", indicating that if he had a house in mind it would have been in the section north of Marylebone Road, near Regent's Park. When street numbers were re-allocated in the 1930s, the block of odd numbers from 219 to 229 was assigned to an Art Deco building known as Abbey House, constructed in 1932 for the Abbey Road Building Society, which the company occupied until 2002. Almost immediately, the building society started receiving correspondence to Sherlock Holmes from all over the world, in such volumes that it appointed a permanent "secretary to Sherlock Holmes" to deal with it. In 1999, Abbey National sponsored the creation of a bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes that now stands at the entrance to Baker Street tube station. Holmes scholars have had a number of theories as to the "real" address. With much of Baker Street devastated during the blitz, little trace is left of the original buildings, and most of them are post-war, except those in what was known Continua »