Museum #13 Sherlock Holmes Museum
‘twas a dreary, toothache sky Monday that we found ourselves queuing outside the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street.
Having worked on Baker Street for a number of years, I’d been looking forward to visiting this one.
The queue took almost an hour, and as anticipation built, a jobbing actor posed for photographs with tourists that have never seen a British bobby before.
I was, of course, fully away that the whole thing was a charade; Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are entirely fictional and no man called Sherlock Holmes had ever lived at this address.
But I’m not sure everyone else us was quite so up to speed.
And whatever you do, don’t try telling them…
And whatever you do, don’t try telling them…
Once inside, you climb the stairs to the first floor of the house and step inside what is supposedly Sherlock’s bedroom.
Very quickly, you ascertain that you aren’t going to see anything of any real historical significance here.
There are bits and bobs bygone, sure, but no Conan Doyle artefacts or TV/film props.
And the stuff that IS in there, isn’t labeled. The whole experience is a bit like walking around the house of a borderline hoarder.
Which leaves me in a bit of a conundrum – very few facts for my write-up.
The décor, on the other hand, is pretty great – fantastic inspiration if you want to pull off that apothecary grime look.
So here you have it – less facts, more furnishings, from 221B Baker Street.
Loved these old tomes:
And this old fella:
Also quite a big fan of this wallpaper – nice:
A pipe rack, of course:
More tobacco paraphernalia:
And a violin too:
Every man needs a desk like this:
I really liked how understated this letterhead is:
And I also quite like this sneaky way of concealing a revolver around the house:
I wasn’t such a big fan of the strange character mannequins, that can be found on the top floor of the museum.
That’s pretty much everything that you can glean from the Sherlock Holmes museum I’m afraid.
The only thing left for me to find out was whether or not the signature deerstalker suited me as well as it had when I was younger…
FIVE FACTS
#1. Sherlock seemed to have a fascination with books on bees. I spotted three.
#2. The Red Headed club was dissolved on October 9, 1890.
#3. There are some real obsessive fans of Sherlock Holmes, that write to him from all over the world. A personal favourite was the advice one uberfan sent him: “Smoke less and rest well!”.
#4. Moriarty “sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”
#5. Sherlock supposedly received a medal in on honour of services rendered to the French Goverment.
1. Cartoon Museum
2. Churchill War Rooms
3. Cinema Museum
4. Dennis Sever’s House
5. Dr Johnson’s house
6. Design Museum
7. Down House
8. The Geffrye Museum
9. London Film Museum
10. London Transport Museum
11. Mansion House
12. Brunel Museum
13. Museum of the Order of St John
14. Musical Museum
15. Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
16. Pollock’s Toy Museum
17. Rose Theatre exhibition
18. Fashion and Textile Museum
19. Royal College of Music Archives and Museum of Instruments
20. Sherlock Holmes Museum
21. Twinings Museum
22. V&A Museum of Childhood
23. Bank of England museum
24. The Stephens Museum
Ant Harris 