🚪 221B Baker Street
The first-floor rooms above Mrs Hudson's: seventeen steps up, a sitting room of chemical stains and bullet-pocked patriotism, and the two armchairs from which every case begins. The most famous address in fiction — and a real museum today.
“It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.”
The most famous address in fiction
221B Baker Street is the first-floor suite Holmes and Watson take together at the start of everything, and the fixed point to which the whole saga returns. A large, airy sitting room, two broad windows over the street, a pair of comfortable armchairs, and a bedroom apiece: modest rooms made immortal by the man who reasons in them. Watson counts the seventeen steps up from the hall so often that Holmes uses the number to teach him the difference between seeing and observing.
A working laboratory disguised as a home
The sitting room is Holmes's instrument. Acids scar the deal-topped chemical table; a Persian slipper on the mantel holds his tobacco; unanswered correspondence is transfixed to the very centre of the wooden mantelpiece with a jack-knife; and the patriotic initials V.R. are picked out in bullet-pocks on the wall, fired there in a fit of boredom with a hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges. Mrs Hudson endures it all, and the household weathers everything from indoor revolver practice to malodorous midnight chemistry.
The room in the world
Because the Baker Street of the 1880s had no number so high, the address was fiction when Conan Doyle wrote it — and is now a museum on the real Baker Street, complete with a recreated study and the seventeen steps. It has become the template for every detective's headquarters since, and the reason a brass '221B' still means one thing to readers in any language.
Who it touches
Where it appears
A Study in Scarlet
1887
Watson meets Holmes, and a corpse in an empty Brixton house — RACHE scrawled in blood — opens the first case: a revenge trail reaching back to Utah.
The Adventure of the Empty House
1903
Holmes returns from the dead with a wax bust in the window and Colonel Moran's air-gun in the dark — the great hiatus ends with a snap of handcuffs.
The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
1921
A crown diamond, a wax dummy in the window again, and a gramophone playing violin: the thieves hand Holmes the stone while talking themselves into prison.