A network of mews and stables...

After Conan Doyle’s failed attempt to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, the public and Dr Watson were overjoyed when he returned. The story of their first case together after the reunion is told in The Adventure of the Empty House where they track down the murderer of a young gambler, the Honourable Ronald Adair.

After taking a cab from Watson’s lodgings in Kensington to Cavendish Square they set off on foot.
“Holmes’s knowledge of the byways of London was extraordinary, and on this occasion he passed rapidly and with an assured step through a network of mews and stables, the very existence of which I had never known.” The trail takes them to the empty house, opposite Holmes’s rooms in 221b Baker Street, where they foil Moran’s assassination attempt and reveal him to be the murderer.

This story provides the clearest indication of the ‘real’ location of 221b Baker Street – of course, it was a fictional address but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to identify it. Baker Street has been renamed, renumbered and much rebuilt after wartime bombing. In Victorian times, the Sherlock Holmes museum, which claims to be 221b, was not even in Baker Street at all but Upper Baker Street and the highest numbered house in Baker Street proper was 85; the section of road between Baker Street and Upper Baker Street was at that time called York Place. There was no 221 Baker Street until these three roads were amalgamated in the 1930s and even then it was not the number of the house where the museum is, that is 239, but the site of the newly built Abbey House, HQ of the Abbey National Building Society until 2002.
Almost as soon as Abbey House was built, the Building Society started receiving letters addressed to the detective; so much so that they employed a full-time secretary to deal with them. The general reply was apparently that he had retired and was keeping bees in Sussex. There was a great deal of controversy when the museum opened in the 1990s and installed a plaque proclaiming that it was 221b Baker Street and asked that letters to Holmes should be delivered there instead. The dispute wasn’t finally resolved until the Building Society moved out.
Of course, it’s impossible to find an address that never existed in the first place but it makes an interesting puzzle and I’m hoping to use it in a guided walk I’m planning for later in the year. In preparation for that I spent the afternoon wandering the mews of Marylebone.