Baker Street Irregular (Address)

Baker Street Irregular (Address)

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Fascinating TIL about what happens to mail sent to 221B Baker Street. "When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first began writing Sherlock Holmes stories back in the late 19th century, 221B Baker Street didn’t exist.
[...]
This all changed in the 1930s when the street numbers in London were rejigged and reallocated to make things a little more streamlined. During the reallocation, a recently constructed building for the Abbey Road Building Society (aka Santander), known as “Abbey House” was awarded all of the odd numbers between 219 and 229.
[...]
Now you’re probably thinking that a large, faceless corporation like a bank would have dismissed these letters as an annoyance and have them shredded or something, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the bank went out and hired someone to serve as “Sherlock Holmes’ personal secretary” and charged them with reading and responding to the mail.
[...]
By this point [the year 2002], Westminster council had grown pretty sick of dealing with the issue and when the bank moved, they granted the [Sherlock Holmes museum] exclusive rights to use the address 221B Baker Street, even though the museum itself still resided between 237 and 241 Baker Street."
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/sherlock-holmes-mail/

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