Sherlock Holmes — London

Piccadilly Circus, and the Criterion on its south side. A young army doctor stands at the bar here, back from Afghanistan with a wounded shoulder and too little money to go on living in a hotel in the Strand. Someone taps him on the shoulder.

The sight of a friendly face in the great wilderness of London is a pleasant thing indeed to a lonely man.

It is young Stamford, who dressed wounds under him at Barts. Over lunch at the Holborn, Watson says he needs cheaper rooms, and Stamford knows a man who is looking for someone to share a suite. That afternoon he takes Watson to Barts to meet him.

The Henry VIII gate on West Smithfield, and behind it a hospital that has treated the sick since 1123. Stamford brings Watson to the chemical laboratory. There is one student in the room, bent over a distant table. He springs up with a test-tube in his hand, shouting that he has found a test for bloodstains at last, and grips Watson's hand.

"How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."

Watson has no idea how he knows, and Holmes does not explain for weeks.

Baker Street was a street of plain brick terraces then, as most of it still is. The day after they meet, Holmes and Watson come to look at the rooms Holmes has found.

They consisted of a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows.

Divided between two, the rent is moderate, and they take them on the spot. Watson moves in that evening; Holmes follows in the morning with his boxes and portmanteaus.

There was no number 221 in Baker Street when the stories were written. The museum at 239 has carried it since 1990.