The Baker Street lodgings shared by Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and the domestic centre of the entire Canon. Present (literally or by reference) in almost every story.
The rooms
The rooms are on the first floor of a house in Baker Street, Marylebone, London, run by Mrs. Hudson. Holmes has lodged here since A Study in Scarlet (1887 in-universe).
Described elements across the Canon:
- The sitting room: two armchairs by the fireplace; Holmes’s armchair is his thinking spot; tobacco in a Persian slipper; a violin; chemistry equipment; papers in organised chaos; a bullet-pocked “VR” (Victoria Regina) worked into the wall
- Holmes’s bedroom: off the sitting room
- Watson’s bedroom: upstairs
- Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen/ground floor: source of meals and the famous entries of clients
The ritual of the client
The arrival of a new client at Baker Street is a Canon formula:
- Mrs. Hudson announces (or a telegram arrives, or Holmes reads the newspaper)
- Holmes and Watson observe the client from the window or the doorway before they enter
- Holmes’s preliminary deductions from the client’s appearance
- The client’s narrative
- Holmes’s questions; Watson’s reactions; the case begins
Practical details
- The real Baker Street in Doyle’s day was numbered differently; 221 did not correspond to any real building
- The Sherlock Holmes Museum now occupies 239 Baker Street but markets itself as “221B”
- The Abbey National Building Society occupied 215–229 Baker Street for decades and employed a secretary to answer Holmes’s mail
Symbolic significance
221B is the Canon’s anchor of safety and normality — the space Holmes returns to between cases, where the chaos of Victorian crime is processed into narrative. Its familiarity (the fire, the tobacco, Watson reading, Holmes’s experiments) provides a stable backdrop against which each new case’s strangeness stands out.
The address has become the most famous fictional address in the English language.