Sherlock Holmes Museum - London, UK

6th January 2014 - £8

The Desolation of Smug

A new year, a new season of Sherlock, the BBC’s much-hallowed flagship drama, and it appears the seams in the deer-stalker are starting to fray. Silly motorbike chases, oh so sentimental asides (we get it, they’re friends) and a worrying lack of puzzles only a genius could solve have left a pretty special show feeling less Twin Peaks and more Peak Practice. I’m clearly in a minority over this, however, as on my first attempted visit to the Sherlock Holmes Museum the queue stretched from 221B to Madame Tussaud’s. You can sing for that, I thought, but promised that “Joseph Deeney will return!” and return he did, the day after the disastrous second episode and finally I was in league with the common man as the queue had dissipated to a manageable half an hour.

Looks nothing like
Cumberbatch

I really like Sherlock Holmes. It presents its reader with an encouragingly consistent arc: problem, genius, solution. That’s it. It’s a simple formula that’s used by House, Mary Poppins, Jeeves and the Cat in the Hat and it’s the narrative gift that keeps on giving. Conan Doyle’s stories aren't perfect (pantomime villains, convenient clues and some unsatisfying denouements), but on the whole, they're 60 pretty solid works. He’s the world’s most filmed character and the museum rather boldly claims 221B Baker Street to be the world's most famous address. We’ll see if the hype is justified, and if not, we’ll report them to the Prime Minister (who lives at 10 Downing Street). 

The first thing that strikes you on approaching the museum is the unfortunate out-of-work actors they’ve dressed up like Holmes and a Victorian policeman parading the entrance, a novelty front for their ticket-stubbing duties. They gambolled about and posed for photographs in a convincingly jocund fashion which was impressive as I’ve seen people in similar roles with eyes so dead they look like a bear that's just eaten its own cub. Their uniforms, however, were mangey, flea-bitten tat that could pass as Victorian originals. “What about the female members of staff?” I hear you ask, “Were they dressed as Irene Adler, Mrs Hudson or Mary Watson?” No, no, no, you impertinent fools, they were dressed up as scullery maids just like they weren’t in the books. Brilliant. 

I don't know either of these people.

Now, I’ve heard of ‘exit through the gift shop’ but ‘entrance through the gift shop’ is a new concept to me. Their stock seemed your typical subject-specific gewgaw: deer-stalkers, magnifying glasses, Victorian… stuff. I stayed well away and dismissed it as pointless junk but my fellow visitors were lapping it up, and eventually bought their tickets along with armfuls of red phone boxes, black cabs and pipes they'll never smoke. And these were people from all over the world, just goes to show you get suckers in every language.

And so, on to the ticket price: £8. 50p more expensive than The Clink. An inauspicious caveat. Looks like this case will be called “Joseph Deeney and the Adventure of the Empty Wallet”. What’s more, they make you queue up again, this time outside in the bracing Victorian winter, until more punctual visitors have finished looking around the museum proper. Not ideal but it gave me time to read the tour guide that doubled up as a ticket - a green/stingy alternative to a problem solved, I thought, rather skilfully. The guide helpfully let you know that you can take photos and that “you may find yourself wishing that you could hail a horse-drawn handsome cab to take you home!” No I fucking won’t! I’d just put a tenner on my Oyster and I live miles away. 

Sherlock's a big fan of
Ving Rhames

As to be expected with such a small terraced house, it would be a squeeze for a five-a-side team and my observations led me to deduce that this was going to be a “cosy” experience at best. The first floor was kitted out in your bog-standard cluttered Victoriana, nauseatingly typical for British museums. You could snoop around, have your picture taken in fireside chairs with hat and pipe and… that’s it. There’s the nice touch of ‘VR’ written on the wall in bullet holes but I only know of this from reading the books, I couldn’t tell you which story it's from or why he does it and the museum goes to great lengths in making sure I’m none the wiser. There’s probably plenty of little in-jokes that I’m oblivious to, but here, they’re left as in-jokes. 

The Hound of the Baskervilles
(after severe distemper)

The second floor's just weird. It was just some stuff. I don’t know if it was vintage or replica because no-one bloody told me. The write-ups in the guide were lacklustre at best and what the place was screaming out for, more than anything, were some human guides. The staff are all over-qualified actors, they could put on a great show. I'm wasted in this line of work. I could turn that place upside down. 

One of the rooms had relics from the stories like a dagger, an embroidery and a bust of Napoleon (from my favourite story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons), but who cares? These relics are in my ‘mind palace’, they don’t exist, that’s the point of fiction.

The problem with the houses of writers is that all the magic of their genius is in their work, their houses are just… houses. Added to this, 221B Baker Street has the onerous duty of “belonging” to a bloke who never even existed. Added to THIS, it’s not even 221B Baker Street, that’s further up the road, this address was acquired by the museum after much legal wrangling - so what’s the fucking point? It’s not the writer’s house, the character’s fictional and it’s not even the bloody house it’s meant to be. Why am I meant to care?

You may recognise some of these
items from the stories... if you
happened to imagine them that way.

The second floor is mostly wax dummies made up to look like characters who don’t exist so we can’t judge them on their likeness. Oh! look its the Napoleon of crime, James Moriarty. So what? It’s a candle made up to look like a bloke in a suit. Scary darey!

Less the Napoleon of crime, more
the Terry Nutkins of crime

You get some posh toilets at the top that you’re not even allowed to use and, amazingly, that’s it. There’s your £8. It’s well known that Conan Doyle’s best works were his short stories but if this place was a publication it'd be a post-it note. It’s a tacky, cheap and pointless venture that serves more as tourist tax than homage to the world’s greatest detective. Here’s my advice: find an £8 edition of the complete works online, book a week off work and bathe in its glow. Don’t analyse the formula, soak it in and wallow in it and please, avoid this psoriatic canker at all costs. 

Nothing here even belonged to Conan Doyle, it’s a boring, vapid waste of time like a car boot sale that charges at the gate where you can’t buy anything because you don’t fucking want to. Seriously, if you were disappointed by Sherlock season 3, I’d hold on for season 4 before visiting this place as you may run the risk of dismissing the stories wholesale and that’d be a crying shame. 

If the stories are, "problem, genius, solution", then this museum is simply, "problem", and much like Moriarty, it’s getting away with murder because of reputation alone. 

The Terrifying Case of the
Writing Man, aarrgghhh!!!

In a nutshell, I was in the queue longer than I was in the museum. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that’s bullshit.