The Sherlock Holmes Self-Guided Trail

Where gas lamps flicker, clues hide in plain sight, and afternoon tea is served with a side of mystery

Written by Payal Tyagi, The Indian Queen of London Afternoon Tea, for The Travelling Telegraph

I confess I have never read A Study in Scarlet. My love affair with Sherlock Holmes began the moment Benedict Cumberbatch swept across a rain-slicked London street in the BBC series and I thought: I want to walk those streets too. So I did. Armed with an Oyster card, an appetite, and the firm conviction that afternoon tea is always the answer — whatever the question — I set out to follow the great detective’s footsteps across the capital.

The game, as they say, was afoot.

First Stop: 221B Baker Street

Every Sherlockian pilgrimage must begin here. Baker Street Underground station announces its credentials immediately — the platform tiles are decorated with silhouettes of Holmes in his deerstalker, and you emerge onto a street that wears its famous resident’s name with considerable pride.

A short walk north brings you to 221B Baker Street, now home to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. The Victorian townhouse has been restored with obsessive attention to detail: Holmes’s violin on the mantelpiece, Watson’s medical bag by the door, the Persian slipper stuffed with tobacco, and Mrs Hudson’s parlour looking exactly as though its occupants have just stepped out to pursue a villain through the fog. Costumed guides in full Victorian dress add to the atmosphere considerably. Arrive early — the queue of fellow devotees grows quickly, particularly at weekends.

A mystery worth noting: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never actually described Holmes wearing an Inverness cape or deerstalker hat. Those iconic accessories were invented by illustrator Sidney Paget for the Strand Magazine — and then adopted so enthusiastically by the public that even Doyle couldn’t dislodge them.

Outside the museum, pause at the gas lamps that line this stretch of Baker Street. London converted almost entirely to electric lighting long ago, but a handful of streets — particularly around St James’s and Pall Mall — still burn genuine gas flames. Standing beneath one on a grey London morning, it is extraordinarily easy to imagine the clatter of a hansom cab and a tall figure hailing it from the pavement.

The Criterion Building, Piccadilly Circus

From Baker Street, I took the Jubilee line to Green Park and walked through to Piccadilly Circus — because no proper Holmes trail should skip the Criterion building, where Dr Watson first learned of Sherlock Holmes’s existence. It was here, in Doyle’s telling, that Watson’s old friend Stamford tapped him on the shoulder at the Criterion Bar and mentioned a peculiar fellow at Bart’s Hospital who needed someone to share rooms with. A commemorative plaque on the wall marks the spot.

The building is as dazzling as ever — gold mosaic ceiling, Portuguese marble walls, ornate columns — and in 2023 it welcomed a new occupant: Masala Zone Piccadilly Circus, a grand Indian brasserie from the team behind Amaya and Chutney Mary. For this particular visitor — an Indian writer who considers herself something of an authority on afternoon tea — discovering that Watson’s famous meeting place now serves Indian High Tea under that glittering Victorian ceiling felt like a rather pleasing piece of detective work.

Afternoon tea here has an unmistakably subcontinental flavour: Masala Chai, Darjeeling and Assam teas, and savouries that wander delightfully between London and India. The room buzzes. The ceiling dazzles. Holmes would, I think, have approved of the efficient service.

Great Scotland Yard

A fifteen-minute walk from Trafalgar Square brings you to Great Scotland Yard — the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, where Inspector Lestrade and his colleagues (somewhat reluctantly) called upon Holmes when their own considerable efforts fell short. The building has since been transformed into a hotel, but its Victorian bones remain intact and its history is unmistakable.

I was famished by this point — Baker Street to Piccadilly to here is a respectable morning’s walking — and the hotel’s Parlour restaurant was calling. I sat down to the Signature GSY Themed Afternoon Tea, designed specifically around the building’s history as a police headquarters and its connection to Lestrade’s partnership with Holmes. Sandwiches arrived on tiered stands alongside scones, pastries and a pot of something properly fortifying. On Wednesdays, Veuve Clicquot champagne is included as a complimentary upgrade — worth bearing in mind when you are planning your day of detection.

10 Northumberland Street: The Sherlock Holmes Pub

Restored, replenished, and considerably more alert, I walked five minutes to 10 Northumberland Street — and stopped short on the pavement. The window glass of the Sherlock Holmes Pub bears an etched figure of Holmes in his Inverness cape, pipe between his teeth, deerstalker on his head, with Watson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle alongside. The pub is referenced in The Hound of the Baskervilles as the Northumberland Hotel, and appeared earlier as the Northumberland Arms in The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.

Entry is free. I asked at the bar before heading upstairs to the meticulously recreated study of Sherlock Holmes, built for the 1951 Festival of Britain and stuffed with artefacts from his cases — including the famous blue carbuncle. The mannequin Holmes, I admit, suffers somewhat from comparison with Benedict Cumberbatch. But the room itself is wonderful. The pub downstairs serves decent food if you need a mid-trail sustenance top-up — and it makes for an atmospheric stop in its own right.

The Langham Hotel

A six-minute walk to Charing Cross, a hop on the Bakerloo line, and eight minutes on foot from Oxford Circus brought me to Portland Place and the magnificent Langham Hotel — one of London’s grandest Victorian institutions, and one with strong Holmesian credentials. The Langham appears in The Sign of Four and A Scandal in Bohemia, and it was here that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde dined together in 1889 — a legendary literary evening that allegedly resulted in Doyle agreeing to write more Holmes stories.

The Langham holds the remarkable distinction of being the first hotel in the world to serve afternoon tea commercially, when it opened in 1865. Its Palm Court remains one of London’s most celebrated venues for the ritual — grand, glittering, and overseen today by culinary icon Michel Roux. Even if afternoon tea here is a separate excursion from your trail, the lobby alone is worth a respectful pause.