Holmes HubSherlock Holmes’s London, 1889

Holmes Hub: what it is

Holmes Hub is a map of Sherlock Holmes’s London. Every street, square, station and building that Arthur Conan Doyle names in the stories is here, 162 places and 636 mentions, pinned to the city as it stood in 1889.

What it does

Click a dot and you get Doyle’s own sentence, and every story that mentions the place. Pick a story from the list and only its London remains. Switch on 1889 map and Charles Booth’s poverty map of that year lies underneath.

What you can do with it

Walk a story, street by street. See which London a client came from. Fly through Marylebone, the West End, Westminster or the City in 3D, over buildings traced from the Ordnance Survey of the 1870s. Or press ▶ demo, lean back, and let the map tell a story.

F full screen · L hide the list · K old maps · hover for a preview, click for Doyle’s words.

The stories

📖 Read all 87 stories: the sixty by Doyle, his other Holmes pieces and the early parodies, with every place on the map marked in the text.

The demo tells a story on the map, stop by stop, each time a different one and often in a different part of London. Every quotation is Doyle’s, checked word for word against the text.

• The Adventure of the Empty House 1894 · Marylebone
  London, spring 1894.
• The Final Problem 1891 · Marylebone
  April 1891.
• The Resident Patient 1893 · Marylebone
  A young doctor, Percy Trevelyan, has everything but money.
• The Illustrious Client 1902 · Marylebone
  September 1902.
• The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor 1892 · Marylebone
  Lord Robert St.
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle 1892 · West End
  Two days after Christmas.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles 1902 · West End
  Before the moor, there is London.
• The Adventure of the Red Circle 1911 · West End
  A landlady near the British Museum has a lodger who pays well, never shows his face and communicates only by notes.
• The Sign of Four 1890 · Westminster & Lambeth
  Every year a pearl arrives for Mary Morstan, from no one she knows.
• The Naval Treaty 1893 · Westminster & Lambeth
  Percy Phelps, a promising young man at the Foreign Office, is given a secret treaty to copy overnight.
• The Man with the Twisted Lip 1891 · Holborn & the City
  Neville St Clair lives in a villa in Kent and goes up to the City every morning like thousands of other men.
• The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans 1908 · Holborn & the City
  November, and a fog so thick that London has stopped.

The books, 1887–1927

1. 1887A Study in Scarlet
2. 1890The Sign of the Four
3. 1892Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
4. 1894Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
5. 1902Hound of the Baskervilles
6. 1905Return of Sherlock Holmes
7. 1915The Valley of Fear
8. 1917His Last Bow
9. 1927Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

▶ Fly through one of them in 3D, drawn at random, or press ▶ demo on any map.

Conan Doyle’s London

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote most of the Holmes stories without living in London for long. He knew it the way a reader of maps and newspapers knows it, and he used it with remarkable precision, until the moment the story needed a door that did not exist.

A proposition: Doyle’s London is real right up to the moment a crime is committed. Then the address disappears from every map.

Holmes and Watson stroll down Regent Street, cut across Hyde Park, take a cab from Charing Cross, and anyone can follow them there: 162 of the places Doyle names sit exactly where he put them. But look where the deeds are done. Enoch Drebber is found dead at 3 Lauriston Gardens. Eduardo Lucas is murdered at 16 Godolphin Street. The Red-Headed League keeps its office in Pope’s Court, and its victim lives in Saxe-Coburg Square. Neville St Clair vanishes into the Bar of Gold in Upper Swandam Lane. Mycroft Holmes sits in the Diogenes Club, in a Pall Mall that never had one. Not one of these can be found on a map of London. They are among the 82 names on this site that no map knows. Even 221B did not exist: when the first stories appeared, Baker Street’s numbers stopped well short of it.

London sets the stage; the deeds are done behind doors that never existed.

And Booth’s map adds a second reading. Rich and poor lived close together: behind the gold squares of Mayfair ran dark-blue alleys, and in Marylebone red and gold streets lie a few minutes’ walk from black courts. That is exactly Holmes’s city. Doyle has his clients step from one world into the other, sometimes within a single story. He rarely says so. The map does.

Up for debate

Is that right? Perhaps the invented doors are simply discretion, a doctor’s habit of changing names. Perhaps Doyle did not know London well enough to be exact, and the precision is ours, added after the fact. Or perhaps the gap between the real street and the invented door is precisely what makes the stories feel true. I would like to be argued with: tell me in the comments below.

The maps

Underneath the places lie four old maps and one street network, all from the years in which Doyle was writing. Press K (or the map button) to cycle through them: Booth 1889, the Ordnance Survey, Booth 1898–99, Bacon’s map, and none. On a phone, pick one from the dropdown. Below, for each map: where it comes from, what it is made of, and what was done to it here. The five pictures show the same few streets between Marylebone and Oxford Street, so you can compare them.

None of these maps was drawn to fit a modern street plan. Old surveys are slightly stretched, sheets were scanned at a tilt, paper shrinks. Every sheet was therefore fitted to the street network of 1889: first as a whole (position, scale and a slight rotation), then, for the Booth and Bacon maps, patch by patch, by sliding small windows of the map until its streets lie on the known streets. The remaining error is measured on those windows and given below as the median and the 90th percentile.

The streets of 1889

Source

OpenHistoricalMap, a volunteer map of the past

Made of

5,241 street segments and 388 railway lines whose start date is 1889 or earlier and that had not yet gone

Used for

the dark map you see without an old map, and the yardstick every old sheet is fitted to

Charles Booth, 1889

Charles Booth, a Liverpool shipowner turned social investigator, had London walked street by street and coloured every street by the means of the people living in it.

Map

Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889

Source

Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0

Made of

four sheets (north-west, south-west, north-east, south-east), with their printed borders cut away

Fitted

to the 1889 streets, window by window; remaining error about 5 m

Covers

from Kensington to Limehouse, and from Islington to Kennington

The Ordnance Survey, 1869–1880

The Ordnance Survey’s town plans at 1:2500 are so detailed that every house is drawn. The 3D buildings are traced from these same sheets, so the buildings and the sheet match by construction.

Map

Map of the City of London and its Environs, 1:2500, surveyed 1869–1880

Source

Wikimedia Commons, public domain (the National Library of Scotland has the full series)

Made of

16 sheets, numbers 024–027, 033–036, 042–045 and 053–056: from Marylebone and Bloomsbury to the City, and south over Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark

Fitted

sheet by sheet (position, scale and a rotation of up to a degree) to the 1889 streets and OpenStreetMap; the edges of each sheet fade out and are mirrored outward, so neighbouring sheets merge without a seam

Charles Booth, 1898–99

Ten years on, Booth’s team walked London again, this time with the police on their beat, and printed a second poverty map. It reaches further than the first: Hampstead, Hammersmith, Greenwich. The colours mean the same, so you can see a street rise or fall in a decade.

Map

Map Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898–99, 6 inches to the mile (1:10,560)

Source

LSE Library, via Wikimedia Commons; no known copyright restrictions

Made of

all 12 sheets

Fitted

per sheet, first as a whole, then window by window; median error 3–6 m per sheet, 90th percentile 9–16 m

Gaps

where Booth printed no sheet, Bacon’s map fills in underneath

Bacon’s map, 1880s

A commercial map rather than a survey, but the only one here that shows Upper Norwood, Norbury and Streatham as Holmes knew them.

Map

Bacon’s New Ordnance Map of London and Suburbs, G. W. Bacon, 1880s

Source

Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Made of

one sheet, from Willesden to Woolwich and down to Croydon

Fitted

first from the map’s own half-mile grid and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, then in 258 windows; median error 6 m, 90th percentile 15 m

3D and the demo

Four districts can be flown through in 3D, on all four maps. On the flat map the ▶ demo travels across London and lifts a circle of the old map at every stop: the Ordnance Survey where it covers the place, otherwise Booth.

About me

The first case. I was eight. London, a family holiday, and somewhere very close to Baker Street. I knew exactly who lived a few streets away, and I asked to go. My parents, reasonable people with a day already planned, said no. A reasonable answer. Not, to an eight-year-old, an acceptable one.

So I did what Holmes would have done. I kept my own counsel, and I went. Nobody saw me go. One street, then another, then the number itself: 221B. And a small boy standing in front of it for as long as an eight-year-old can stand still, which is not long, but long enough.

Then came the problem every runaway discovers too late: the way back. I worked out a cunning detour that would, by pure deduction, deliver me exactly to wherever my parents would be. It had no business working. London is very large, and I was very small. And yet, at the turn of one corner, there they were. Furious, and frightened, and entitled to be both. I have rarely been happier. I had seen 221B.

The vault

That walk went on through a lifetime of London, Holmes, computers and, later, AI. Behind this map sits my vault: a personal knowledge base of plain-text notes in Obsidian that works as a second brain. The stories, the sources, every correction and every decision about this map live there. The canon is cut into passages and stored in Qdrant, a vector database, so each place can be matched to the sentence in which Doyle mentions it, by meaning rather than by keyword.

The idea, and the thinking behind how it is built, are mine; the machines did the tracing. It is a hobby project and still a little rickety here and there. Not your thing? No hard feelings.

Manual

You made it to the manual. Holmes would call that a promising sign; most visitors never get past the map, and that is fine too, because the map works the moment it opens. But almost everything here can be set to your liking: which places you see and how they look, which map of the time lies underneath, how the demo runs, how the stories read. This page tells you what every button does, briefly. It is, after all, the little things that are infinitely the most important.

The flat map

Dots are the places Doyle names; bigger means named more often. Hover for a preview, click for the card with Doyle’s own sentence, photos and every story that mentions it. Tap or click an empty spot to close the card.

Choose a story (top left) shows only that story’s London and zooms until all its places are in view. Hovering a dot then shows the sentence from that story. Sort the story list next to it: A–Z, most places, most mentions, most spread out, furthest from Baker Street, most Baker Street.

Central / Greater London switches between the centre and the districts further out: Norwood, Norbury, Lee, Blackheath and more.

⤢ overview (bottom right) always brings you back to all the places.

The category chips (streets, squares, stations, buildings, parks, water, districts) switch groups of places on and off. The list on the left, L to hide it, sorts them by mentions; click one to fly there.

Maps of the time

Press K or the map button to cycle through the old maps: Booth 1889 → Ordnance Survey 1869–80 → Booth 1898–99 → Bacon’s map, 1880s → none. On a phone, pick one from the dropdown. The name of the map appears top left for a few seconds each time you switch. The 1889 slider fades the old map in and out; the vault slider fades our own map.

3D

▲ 3D opens a district in three dimensions. Q/E rotate, W/S tilt, R reset, N north up, drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Click a light for Doyle’s words, a building for its name and photos. Switch district with the buttons top right; ▼ 2D takes you back to the flat map.

Demo

▶ demo runs on its own. On the flat map, a red dot travels across a still London, leaving a trail of ink and a numbered seal at every stop; at each place a circle of the old map lifts off the city, with Doyle’s sentence beside it. In 3D a story is told stop by stop, each time a different one. Press Esc or click the map to stop. F for full screen. The screen stays awake while the demo runs.

Your pins

The … menu top right, on the flat map and in 3D, sets how the places look and the colours of the map, and remembers it on this device:

• dot size: smaller for the crowded centre, bigger on a phone.
• pin theme: a colour per kind of place. Holmes Hub uses the colours of the chips; Booth 1889 borrows the poverty map’s gold, red and blue; ink & sepia, gaslight, brass & fog and Victorian stamp are quieter and warmer; scarlet, Baker Street by night and neon Soho are bolder; colour-blind safe keeps every kind distinguishable.
• pin shape: round, magnifying glass, drop, diamond, star, ring, or Holmes himself in profile, filled or as a line. The point of the drop and the centre of the glass sit exactly on the place.
• icon outline: the thickness of the line around each pin, from none to heavy.
• map colours: the vault green, paper, night & gold, London fog, blueprint, sepia print, gaslight, Thames at dusk or newspaper, for the flat map and the 3D districts alike. In 3D the pins start as gold lights; a pin theme colours them by kind.

The stories

Read opens the library: every Holmes story by Doyle, his pieces outside the canon and the early parodies, with the illustrations of the day. Inside a story, a place name links to the map and the map links back to the very paragraph, so you can read with the city open beside you. Aa sets the type, ☾ the light.

Everything else

The names London doesn’t know at the bottom are places from the stories that no map has; spot one you can place, and tell us in the comments. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be a real street.

What’s new

Each entry links to the place on the site where the feature lives.

• 27 Sep, evening The story is now told. Choose a story and press ▶ demo: the plot, summarised stop by stop around the places Doyle names, with his own sentence beneath each; only that story’s places stay on the map. Click the Holmes Hub mark in the corner of the map, here and in 3D, and it lights up.
• 27 Sep The demo on the flat map plays the story you have chosen, or picks one if you have not. The card on the map folds away and comes back; the phone layout has been tidied. Holmes himself, in profile, is the default pin (… menu). A small deerstalker in the corner of every page, and this manual got friendlier.
• 27 Sep Illustrations in the stories: 380 pictures from the magazines of the day, Paget and his contemporaries, placed beside the passage they belong to; a library of the 87 stories with pictures; a place name in a story links to the map and the map links back to the very paragraph.
• 27 Sep The stories: all sixty by Doyle, his pieces outside the canon, the early parodies and Leblanc’s Lupin-meets-Holmes, to read here. Eight stories that name no London place are listed as such; twelve stories are now linked to their places by the English text.
• 27 Sep A new demo on the flat map: a dot travels over a still map and at every stop a circle of the old map lifts off the city, smooth on a phone too. The maps now tells where every map comes from, what it is made of and how well it fits, with a picture of each. Pin themes, shapes and outlines in the … menu; the map name shows briefly top left.
• 27 Sep Manual; sorting of the story list; hover a dot inside a story for the sentence from that story; closing a card keeps you in the story; an overview button.
• 27 Sep Two more maps under the map button: Booth’s 1898–99 survey and Bacon’s map of the 1880s, reaching Norwood and Croydon. The Ordnance Survey now covers the City, Chelsea, Pimlico and Southwark; the seams between sheets are gone.
• 27 Sep Greater London: the districts Doyle names outside the centre, from Upper Norwood to Blackheath, after readers on r/SherlockHolmes asked for them.
• 27 Sep Every outlying place checked by hand. Church Street, Stepney is back in Stepney; the Metropolitan Station is Baker Street; places that were never in London are gone.
• 27 Sep A smoother 3D demo: it opens with a line of Doyle’s, flies from the whole city down to the street, and shows which map you are on. Photos in the cards, including 221B.
• 26 Sep Thirteen stories told on the 3D maps; the Whitechapel map of 1888; comments.
• 26 Sep Holmes Hub goes online.