The debate lasted more than a decade and was not resolved until 2002, when the Abbey National vacated their building and the Royal Mail finally agreed to deliver all letters addressed to 221B Baker Street to the museum at 239 Baker Street. The new museum argued that they were better equipped to respond to the inquiries while the Abbey National presumably wanted to continue their accidental role as the secretary to a fictional detective. When the Sherlock Holmes Museum opened at 239 Baker Street in a Georgian townhouse that likely bears a close resemblance to Conan Doyle’s imagined 221 Baker street, there emerged a dispute over which business should receive the letters. Such a profusion of letters were delivered that the bank’s public relations department found it necessary to employ a full-time secretary charged with responding to the urgent inquiries from those in need of Holmes’s unique deductive prowess (these inquiries were usually met with a response that the detective had retired to keep bees in Sussex). From almost the day the Abbey National opened they began receiving letters from all over the world addressed to Mr. Since the 1930s, the famous address has been lumped in as part of a larger block of buildings originally occupied by the Abbey National Building Society. In fact, there is still no 221 Baker Street. But the Sherlock Holmes museum is not, technically speaking, located at 221 Baker Street. If you visit 221B Baker Street today you’ll find the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which was opened in 1990 by the Sherlock Holmes International Society. The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street (image: © The Sherlock Holmes Museum)
#Novel sherlock holmes apeared in series
Let us begin our series today by stalking down the gas-lit streets of Victorian London, and turning our magnifying glass toward an architecture that was defined by Holmes and Watson and poses something of a mystery itself: their London flat at 221B Baker Street. Indeed, we can perhaps trace the entire “buddy-cop” genre back to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective duo. The zeitgeist is saturated with all things Holmesian: two Hollywood films a recent BBC television series another forthcoming series for American television and then there are the countless television shows, plays, and films inspired by the adventures of Holmes and Watson. In fact, he may be more popular today than ever before. Though the last canonical adventure of Holmes and Watson was published in 1927, Sherlock Holmes is still an international cultural icon. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the incomparable consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his intrepid assistant Doctor John Watson made their debut in A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887 in the the pages of Beeton’s Christmas Annual.
For today, Design Decoded starts its newest series as the world turns its eyes to London for the Olympics: Design and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson drawn by Sidney Paget in The Adventure of Silver Blaze (image: Sidney Paget, Wikimedia commons)