"In Sherlock we trust," says the note taped inside a Smithfield phone box. It's not the only one. "America believes in Sherlock," reads some graffiti, scrawled next to similar sentiments from Spain. Londoners may be more used to averting their gaze from red-light 'business cards' in phone booths, but at this one just outside St Bartholomew's Hospital (Barts), the glass is papered with Post-it messages for Sherlock Holmes instead. That is, until the council appears every few months to clean-up the DIY shrine.
Why has this phone box become the focus of Sherlock fandom? In the cliff-hanger that ended series two of the BBC's contemporary adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved stories, Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) was seen jumping, seemingly to his death, from the top of a building. That building was Barts. But for Holmes historians, the institution is more than just a filming location. It was at Barts that Conan Doyle set the very first meeting between Holmes and Watson – the first of what would be many connections between his characters and the Clerkenwell area, not just in Doyle's writing but in the long afterlife of the duo and their various on-screen portrayals.
The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887. Watson, an army surgeon, has returned from the second Anglo-Afghan war and is searching for somewhere nice but affordable to live (that eternal London conundrum). He meets an old colleague: "young Stamford, who had been a dresser under me at Barts." Stamford knows a man looking to go halves on some decent digs in Baker Street and takes Holmes to meet him at the hospital: "We ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor [...] a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory."
So why did Conan Doyle choose Barts for Holmes and Watson's first meeting? "Conan Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh University. However, his setting for the story that became A Study in Scarlet was London [...] so Edinburgh University would have been quite impractical as Watson's alma mater. It had to be one of the London hospitals, and we can really only guess as to why St Bartholomew's was chosen instead of Guy's, St Thomas', Charing Cross, St Mary's, or the London," says Roger Johnson, editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, and co-author of The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany.
'it was at barts that conan doyle set the first meeting between holmes and watson'
Doyle, a qualified physician, may well have visited Barts, but this can't be proven. "It's said that he wrote some of the stories in my office," says Carla Valentine of Barts Pathology Museum.
"I can't find any record of his having visited Barts," says Johnson. "My guess is that he did, on some minor occasion that wasn't considered worth recording. It's reasonable to suppose, I think, that he was aware of Barts Hospital's distinguished history and reputation."
A Study in Scarlet isn't the only Holmes story to feature Clerkenwell locations. Saffron Hill makes an appearance in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons (1905), where it is described as the Italian Quarter (vestiges of this heritage can still be seen today in the remaining Italian delis in this part of EC1 and, of course, St Peter's Italian Church and its annual Our Lady of Mount Carmel procession). In the story, Saffron Hill is home to Pietro Venucci: "one of the greatest cut-throats in London".
We recently stumbled across this phone box, bedecked with tributes to Sherlock Holmes, outside St Bart’s in Smithfield. In the last series of the BBC’s Sherlock, our hero fell to his apparent death from the roof of the hospital. Although the final scene revealed that trickery was afoot, it hasn’t stopped fans of the sleuth leaving personal messages at this latter-day Reichenbach.
Although most of the notes are tongue-in-cheek, we think an informal shrine at this site is a splendid idea, and very much in keeping with the long tradition of pretending Holmes is a real man, rather than a fiction.