The Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street … but is this the real 221B Baker Street? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Patrick Comerford
No 221B Baker Street is said to be the ‘most famous address in the world.’ It is elementary, my dear Watson, for it is here, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), that the detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague, Dr Watson, lived between 1881 and 1904 in a boarding house run by Mrs Hudson.
The character of Sherlock Holmes was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, and since then he has featured in more films than any other character in literature, and he has caught the attention of readers and audiences all over the world. With four novels, 46 short stories, and 75 different actors playing the character of Holmes in more than 200 films, many fans want to see where Holmes and Watson lived.
But, while it may be the most famous address in the world, it takes a little detective work for any sleuth to find the real 221B Baker Street.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once had his medical practice at No 2 Devonshire Place, off Marylebone Street and close to Methodist Church House, where I was taking part in a meeting of the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) on Wednesday [19 September 2018].
It was just a 10-minute walk from Devonshire Place to Baker Street, which explains why Doyle was familiar with the streets in the area. But where exactly is 221B Baker Street?
When Doyle was writing, Baker Street was made up of a number of Georgian townhouses, but these did not run as far as No 221, and the number only became possible when Baker Street was extended north.
The statue of John Doubleday’s Sherlock Holmes outside Baker Street on Marylebone Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Walking in and out of Baker Street Station this week, it was difficult not to notice the larger-than-life statue of Sherlock Holmes outside the station, complete with his deerstalker hat, Inverness cape and pipe.
But this statue is at the Marylebone Street entrance of the station and not on Baker Street. I had to walk around the corner into Baker Street if I was going to find where Holmes and Watson are supposed to have lived.
Walking up Baker Street, I found what should have been the site of No 221B, but for many years it was just part of the headquarters of the Abbey National, then numbered 215−229 Baker Street. It was designed by the Scottish architect John James Joass (1868-1952).
When street numbers were reallocated in the 1930s, the block of odd numbers from 215 to 229 was assigned to the Art Deco building known as Abbey House, built in 1932 for the Abbey Road Building Society. Since the 1930s, the Royal Mail had delivered all letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes to the Abbey National at this building, and the bank employed a special staff member to deal with this correspondence.
The former Abbey National Building on Baker Street had all mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes delivered here (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
When the Sherlock Holmes Museum was established a few doors away, between No 237 and No 241, near the north end of Baker Street, close to Regent’s Park, it wanted to use the address 221B rather than No 239, and this became a protracted dispute between the museum and the Abbey National, a few doors away, whose premises were a few doors away at No 215-229.
The museum went through several appeals for this mail to be delivered to it, on the grounds that it was the most appropriate organisation to respond to the mail, rather than a bank.
All these efforts were in vain, and to reinforce its claims to the address and to mark the 150th anniversary of anniversary, Abbey National sponsored John Doubleday’s bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes outside the Baker Street station.
In the past, Doubleday had produced a statue of Holmes for Meiringen in Switzerland, below the Reichenbach Falls where the intrepid sleuth fell to his apparent death in the story The Final Problem.
The three-metre-high statue shows Holmes wearing an Inverness cape and a deerstalker and holding a pipe, attributes first bestowed on him by Sidney Paget, who illustrated Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories for The Strand Magazine.
GK Chesterton was the first person, back in 1927, to suggest a statue of Holmes for London, but his efforts came to nothing. A new campaign was begun in 1996 by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, which wanted a statue in the middle of Baker Street, and the traffic be damned.’
The Sherlock Holmes Statue Company Limited was set up to manage the project, and in 1998, and the Abbey National agreed to fund the statue because of its connection with Holmes. John Doubleday was given the commission 20 years ago on 31 March 1998.
As no site was available on Baker Street, the statue was erected outside Baker Street tube station, on Marylebone Road. However, some local residents and the St Marylebone Society opposed the proposal, saying it was ‘not very appropriate. It should have been in Baker Street itself, which is much quieter.’
But the plans went ahead, and the statue was unveiled on 23 September 1999 by Lord Tugendhat, chairman of Abbey National and a former Vice-President of the European Commission.
Abbey National was rebranded as Abbey in 2003, and it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Spanish Santander Group in 2004, with further rebrandings and renamings in 2005 and 2010.
No 221B Baker Street … the number has moved to the museum, but it remains London’s best-known address (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
The debate over who could use the famous address was finally resolved when Santander left the former Abbey National headquarters in 2005 after more than 70 years. Today, Abbey House is a mainly empty office block that has been refurbished with office space and apartments that are ready for letting.
The City of Westminster gave the privately-run Sherlock Holmes Museum permission to use the number 221B for the Georgian town house that once had been No 239 Baker Street. All mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes at this address is now delivered to the museum, even though to this day Baker Street is the only street in London that has a house number that appears out of sequence with the rest of the street.
The museum is run by the Sherlock Holmes Society of England, a non-profit organisation, and has been visited by more than 2 million Sherlock Holmes fans since it opened in 1990.
The Georgian townhouse on Baker Street was built in 1815, and had been a boarding house from 1860 to 1936, and covers the period of 1881 to 1904, when Doyle’s stories describe Holmes and Watson living in Baker Street as Mrs Hudson’s paying guests or tenants.
The museum features exhibits from several adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, and recreations of scenes from the 1984 Granada Television series Sherlock Holmes. Inside, the museum has been designed to look exactly s it was described in Doyle’s stories.
Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, greets visitors and guides them through the Victorian rooms in the building arranged over four storeys. These rooms include Sherlock Holmes’s living room, study and bedroom, as well as rooms for Watson and Mrs Hudson, and a bathroom in a small loft.
Visitors can climb up the 17 steps, similar to those in A Scandal in Bohemia, up to Holmes’s crowded parlour, filled with artefacts and furniture from the Victorian era, including traditional wallpaper and gaslight lamps. The rooms are packed with memorabilia referred to in the books, including a magnifying glass, an old copy of The Times, a pipe, a chemistry kit, ink bottles, a violin and a deerstalker.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle (1912-1997), also known as Lady Bromet, made clear her lack of enthusiasm for the museum. She feared the museum would reinforce the idea that Holmes was a real person, and she turned down an offer from the museum to create a room dedicated to her father. Since then, her father’s last remaining possessions have been sold off.
Deerstalkers and bowler hats among the exhibits in the window of the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
But, as Holmes has endured, so have challenges over who owns the right to use his name and image, and who owns the copyright of Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary works.
Lady Bromet and her brothers, Denis Conan Doyle (1909–1955) and Adrian Conan Doyle (1910–1970), the children of Arthur Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874–1940), inherited the copyrights with the estate when their mother died in 1940. When Adrian Conan Doyle died in 1970, Dame Jean became her father’s literary executor and the legal copyright holder to some of the rights to the Sherlock Holmes character, as well as her father’s other works.
She once said that Sherlock Holmes was her family’s curse because of the legal battles over copyright. She and her brothers’ widows initially shared control of a literary trust, but they found it difficult to agree. Denis Conan Doyle had married a Georgian princess, Princess Nina Mdivani (1901-1987), and died in 1955.
With a loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1970, Princess Nina bought the estate and set up Baskervilles Investments Ltd in the Isle of Man. When Princess Nina defaulted on the loan, the RBS sold the rights to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works to Lady Etelka Duncan. Her former son-in-law, Sheldon Reynolds, had adapted Sherlock Holmes in two series in the 1950s and the 1990s, and his ex-wife, Andrea Plunket, Lady Duncan’s daughter, administered the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate until 2014.
But there has been a long-running legal dispute between the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate and Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, a privately-owned British company formed in 2005, and. For example, when Warner Brothers made Sherlock Holmes (2010), the studio was granted a license by the Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate but also ended up signing a ‘Covenant not to Sue’ with Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.
There are eight or nine surviving Doyle heirs, but none is a direct descendant of the author as neither Jean nor her brothers had any children.
As the New York Times wrote in 2010, the character of Sherlock Holmes has been caught in a web of copyright ownership issues ‘so tangled that Professor Moriarty would not have wished them upon him.’
Minding the shop at the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
21 September 2018
Finding my way through Baker Street,
one of the oldest underground stations
Baker Street Station is one of the world’s oldest surviving underground stations (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Patrick Comerford
Baker Street tube station at the junction of Baker Street and Marylebone Road on the London Underground is one of the world’s oldest surviving underground stations. The station, served by five different lines, is one of the original stations of the Metropolitan Railway (MR), the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863.
I was through Baker station twice yesterday [19 September 2018] on my way to a meeting of the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) at Methodist Church House, on Marylebone Road in the City of Westminster.
Baker Street is named after the builder William Baker, who laid out the street in the 18th century. The street is famous both for Gerry Rafferty’s hit single ‘Baker Street,’ recorded 40 years ago in 1978, and because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have us believe Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson once lived at 221B Baker Street.
The area was originally a comfortable, middle-class residential area, but today Baker Street is a busy street mainly occupied by commercial premises.
Baker Street runs south from Regent’s Park, the junction with Park Road, parallel to Gloucester Place, meeting Marylebone Road, Portman Square and Wigmore Street. At the junction with Wigmore Street, Baker Street turns into Orchard Street, which ends when it meets with Oxford Street.
Baker Street station has entrances on Baker Street, Marylebone Road and Chiltern Street. The nearby attractions include Regent’s Park, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussauds, and the Marylebone campus of Westminster University is across the road from the station.
Over the years, Baker Street station has had several booking offices and seen major changes over the past century and a half. The present station is a merging of three original, separate stations:
1, The Circle Line station: Located west to east beneath Marylebone Road, roughly between Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place, this station was a part of the original Metropolitan Railway line from Bishop’s Road to Farringdon Street, opening with it on 10 January 1863.
2, The station once referred to by the Metropolitan Railway as Baker Street East station: The platforms serving the Metropolitan Main Line north to Harrow and beyond, which are located within the triangle formed by Marylebone Road, Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place, following the alignment of Allsop Place. This station was opened 150 years ago on 13 April 1868 by the Metropolitan and St John’s Wood Railway, which was absorbed by the Metropolitan Railway.
3, The deep-level tube station of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway: this is at a lower level beneath the site of Baker Street East, and opened on 10 March 1906.
The colours of the underground at Baker Street Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
With 10 platforms in all, Baker Street has the most London Underground platforms of any station on the network. All this means the station layout is complex and can be difficult to use for people like me who are colour blind and find it difficult to manoeuvre through the colour coding for the different lines that pass through Baker Street. But the staff were helpful yesterday as I found my way between Baker Street and Liverpool Street on my way to and from Stansted Airport.
The Bakerloo line has its origins in the failed projects of the pneumatic 1865 Waterloo and Whitehall Railway and the 1882 Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway.
Originally a project of the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, the line was built by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) and opened between Baker Street and Lambeth North, then called Kennington Road) on 10 March 1906.
The line was extended to Elephant and Castle five months later, on 5 August. The contraction of the name to Bakerloo rapidly caught on, and the official name was changed to match in July 1906.
When work on the line started in June 1898, it had been financed by the mining entrepreneur and company promoter Whitaker Wright, who fell foul of the law over the financial proceedings involved and dramatically completed suicide at the Royal Courts of Justice, after being convicted in 1904. As a result, work on the line was stopped for a few months and did not resume until Charles Yerkes and UERL stepped in and took over the project.
A monumental stone laid by Lord Aberconway, chair of the Metropolitan Railway Company, at Baker Street station in 1912 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
By 1913, the Metropolitan line had been extended from its original northern terminus at Baker Street to the west with interchange stations with the Great Central Railway at Marylebone and the Great Western Railway at Paddington, and a new station at Edgware Road.
By the mid-1930s, the Metropolitan line was suffering from congestion caused by the limited capacity of its tracks between Baker Street and Finchley Road. To relieve this pressure, the network-wide New Works Programme (1935-1940) included building new sections of tunnel between the Bakerloo line’s platforms at Baker Street and Finchley Road and replacing three Metropolitan line stations – Lord’s, Marlborough Road and Swiss Cottage – between those points with two new Bakerloo stations at St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage.
The Bakerloo line also took over the Metropolitan line’s service to Stanmore in 1939. The branch remained part of the Bakerloo line until 1979, when congestion problems on the Bakerloo line led to opening the Jubilee line.
Restoration work in the 1980s on the oldest portions of Baker Street station brought it back to something similar to its 1863 appearance, so that today Baker Street brings together modern travel and Victorian vision.
Baker Street Station, facing onto Marylebone Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Patrick Comerford
Baker Street tube station at the junction of Baker Street and Marylebone Road on the London Underground is one of the world’s oldest surviving underground stations. The station, served by five different lines, is one of the original stations of the Metropolitan Railway (MR), the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863.
I was through Baker station twice yesterday [19 September 2018] on my way to a meeting of the trustees of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) at Methodist Church House, on Marylebone Road in the City of Westminster.
Baker Street is named after the builder William Baker, who laid out the street in the 18th century. The street is famous both for Gerry Rafferty’s hit single ‘Baker Street,’ recorded 40 years ago in 1978, and because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have us believe Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson once lived at 221B Baker Street.
The area was originally a comfortable, middle-class residential area, but today Baker Street is a busy street mainly occupied by commercial premises.
Baker Street runs south from Regent’s Park, the junction with Park Road, parallel to Gloucester Place, meeting Marylebone Road, Portman Square and Wigmore Street. At the junction with Wigmore Street, Baker Street turns into Orchard Street, which ends when it meets with Oxford Street.
Baker Street station has entrances on Baker Street, Marylebone Road and Chiltern Street. The nearby attractions include Regent’s Park, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussauds, and the Marylebone campus of Westminster University is across the road from the station.
Over the years, Baker Street station has had several booking offices and seen major changes over the past century and a half. The present station is a merging of three original, separate stations:
1, The Circle Line station: Located west to east beneath Marylebone Road, roughly between Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place, this station was a part of the original Metropolitan Railway line from Bishop’s Road to Farringdon Street, opening with it on 10 January 1863.
2, The station once referred to by the Metropolitan Railway as Baker Street East station: The platforms serving the Metropolitan Main Line north to Harrow and beyond, which are located within the triangle formed by Marylebone Road, Upper Baker Street and Allsop Place, following the alignment of Allsop Place. This station was opened 150 years ago on 13 April 1868 by the Metropolitan and St John’s Wood Railway, which was absorbed by the Metropolitan Railway.
3, The deep-level tube station of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway: this is at a lower level beneath the site of Baker Street East, and opened on 10 March 1906.
The colours of the underground at Baker Street Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
With 10 platforms in all, Baker Street has the most London Underground platforms of any station on the network. All this means the station layout is complex and can be difficult to use for people like me who are colour blind and find it difficult to manoeuvre through the colour coding for the different lines that pass through Baker Street. But the staff were helpful yesterday as I found my way between Baker Street and Liverpool Street on my way to and from Stansted Airport.
The Bakerloo line has its origins in the failed projects of the pneumatic 1865 Waterloo and Whitehall Railway and the 1882 Charing Cross and Waterloo Electric Railway.
Originally a project of the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, the line was built by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) and opened between Baker Street and Lambeth North, then called Kennington Road) on 10 March 1906.
The line was extended to Elephant and Castle five months later, on 5 August. The contraction of the name to Bakerloo rapidly caught on, and the official name was changed to match in July 1906.
When work on the line started in June 1898, it had been financed by the mining entrepreneur and company promoter Whitaker Wright, who fell foul of the law over the financial proceedings involved and dramatically completed suicide at the Royal Courts of Justice, after being convicted in 1904. As a result, work on the line was stopped for a few months and did not resume until Charles Yerkes and UERL stepped in and took over the project.
A monumental stone laid by Lord Aberconway, chair of the Metropolitan Railway Company, at Baker Street station in 1912 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
By 1913, the Metropolitan line had been extended from its original northern terminus at Baker Street to the west with interchange stations with the Great Central Railway at Marylebone and the Great Western Railway at Paddington, and a new station at Edgware Road.
By the mid-1930s, the Metropolitan line was suffering from congestion caused by the limited capacity of its tracks between Baker Street and Finchley Road. To relieve this pressure, the network-wide New Works Programme (1935-1940) included building new sections of tunnel between the Bakerloo line’s platforms at Baker Street and Finchley Road and replacing three Metropolitan line stations – Lord’s, Marlborough Road and Swiss Cottage – between those points with two new Bakerloo stations at St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage.
The Bakerloo line also took over the Metropolitan line’s service to Stanmore in 1939. The branch remained part of the Bakerloo line until 1979, when congestion problems on the Bakerloo line led to opening the Jubilee line.
Restoration work in the 1980s on the oldest portions of Baker Street station brought it back to something similar to its 1863 appearance, so that today Baker Street brings together modern travel and Victorian vision.
Baker Street Station, facing onto Marylebone Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)