Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street and the Canon

Short of money after his years abroad, Watson decides to give up his hotel, and that same day is standing at the Criterion Bar when a tap on the shoulder reintroduces him to Stamford, a dresser from his Barts days. Stamford remembers a hospital man "who could not get someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms" — and the canon is off. The restaurant behind the bar opened in 1873, built in Neo-Byzantine style by Thomas Verity; it is Grade II* listed and faces Piccadilly Circus. A restaurant still trades in the building — Masala Zone since 2023.

Visitor guidance: The Criterion building faces Piccadilly Circus; a restaurant (Masala Zone since 2023) operates inside the Grade II* listed building.

Stamford walks Watson round to the chemical laboratory at Barts, a chamber bristling with retorts and blue-flamed Bunsen lamps. Holmes, who has just shouted "I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hæmoglobin, and by nothing else", springs up, shakes the newcomer's hand and reads his history at a glance: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Before they part he has proposed the Baker Street suite he has his eye on. Barts itself is older than the story: founded in 1123, it is Britain's oldest hospital still working from its original site, and the statue-topped Henry VIII gate is still its main entrance.

Visitor guidance: Barts is a working NHS hospital; visitors can enter by the statue-topped Henry VIII gate on West Smithfield.

Next day the pair inspect the rooms at No. 221B: a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, lit by two broad windows. The bargain is concluded on the spot and Watson moves in that evening. From here Watson chronicles four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914. The number never existed when Doyle wrote — Baker Street stopped below 221 — yet Abbey National once kept a full-time secretary just to answer Holmes's mail. Since 1990 the number belongs to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, an 1815 townhouse between 237 and 241, laid out like the fiction with 17 steps up to the study.

Visitor guidance: The Sherlock Holmes Museum sits between 237 and 241 Baker Street; the study overlooking the street is its highlight.

Holmes's cases keep bumping into Scotland Yard's own men: a newspaper cutting in A Study in Scarlet hands the credit to "the well-known Scotland Yard officials, Messrs. Lestrade and Gregson". In 1890 the Metropolitan Police left Great Scotland Yard for a new headquarters on the Victoria Embankment, designed by Richard Norman Shaw and named New Scotland Yard. The name had long been shorthand for London policing itself — "just as Wall Street gave its name to New York's financial district". The Shaw buildings survive as a Grade I listed pair on the Embankment; the Met's working headquarters since 2016 is the Curtis Green Building on the same river frontage.

Visitor guidance: The Norman Shaw Buildings stand on the Victoria Embankment just south of the Ministry of Defence; view them from the Embankment pavement. The Met's current Yard is the Curtis Green Building further along.

In "The Noble Bachelor", new in The Strand Magazine in April 1892, Lord Robert St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral, marries the San Francisco heiress Hatty Doran at St George's, Hanover Square — an absolutely quiet wedding with only half a dozen intimate friends. At the wedding breakfast the bride vanishes; her dress and ring wash ashore in the Serpentine, and Lestrade drags the river while Holmes, who has dealt with similar cases before, finds a first husband everyone believed dead. The 1720s church, its portico carried on six Corinthian columns, still stages society weddings.

Visitor guidance: St George's remains the Anglican parish church of Mayfair, one small block south of Hanover Square near Oxford Circus.

Holmes's family secret comes out in "The Greek Interpreter", new in The Strand Magazine in September 1893: an elder brother, larger and stouter, whom Holmes concedes is his superior at deduction — a man who, given an armchair, would be the greatest criminal agent alive. Mycroft's club is the Diogenes, started for men who want no company: no member takes the least notice of another, and talking means expulsion. Mycroft lodges in Pall Mall and is seen nowhere else; by 1908, in "The Bruce-Partington Plans", "his Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall" are his whole cycle. The club is Doyle's invention; the street of gentlemen's clubs is real.

Location precision: The Diogenes Club is Doyle's invention; the story only places its door on Pall Mall, some little distance from the Carlton, so the pin marks the street.

Visitor guidance: Pall Mall runs from St James's Street to Trafalgar Square, its clubs — the Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers — still standing.

The tour ends with one of the canon's most celebrated deductions. In "The Bruce-Partington Plans", published in The Strand Magazine in 1908, the clerk Cadogan West is found dead just outside Aldgate Station, seven of ten secret submarine plans in his pocket. Holmes and Lestrade stand on the track where it emerges from the tunnel, and the points give Holmes his answer: West was killed elsewhere, rode on the roof of a Metropolitan train and was shaken off where the line jolts at Aldgate. The station opened in 1876 and still carries Circle line trains between Liverpool Street and Tower Hill.

Visitor guidance: Aldgate is a working Underground station in London fare zone 1, with its entrance on Aldgate High Street.