Conan Doyle's Empty Waiting Room
Why is it significant?
Find the plaque on the front of number 2 Upper Wimpole Street. In the spring of 1891 a thirty-one-year-old Scottish doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle rented rooms in this house to set up as an eye specialist, a smart address among the consultants, with a brass plate and high hopes.
Key Facts
| Place | Conan Doyle's Empty Waiting Room |
|---|---|
| Address | 2 Upper Wimpole Street, London W1G 6LD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52060, -0.14860 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the plaque on the front of number 2 Upper Wimpole Street. In the spring of 1891 a thirty-one-year-old Scottish doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle rented rooms in this house to set up as an eye specialist, a smart address among the consultants, with a brass plate and high hopes.
He had trained in medicine at Edinburgh and spent the first months of that year studying the eye in Vienna. Holmes already existed: two short novels had appeared, without making much noise. Doyle walked here every morning from his lodgings in Montague Place and sat in his consulting room from ten until the afternoon. And, as he later admitted in his memoirs, not a single patient ever rang the bell.
So he used the silence. In that empty room he wrote short stories about his detective for a new monthly, The Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia, published in July 1891. The monthly stories were a sensation, and sales of the magazine soared. Holmes's method, reading a stranger's life from a callus, a tan or a bootlace, came from Doyle's old Edinburgh teacher, the surgeon Joseph Bell, who could tell a patient's job and travels at a glance.
That spring Doyle fell dangerously ill with influenza. Lying in bed, he made up his mind: he would give up medicine and live by his pen. Within two years he grew so tired of Holmes that he sent him over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. The story goes that some twenty thousand readers cancelled their subscriptions. Public demand won in the end, and Holmes came back to life in 1903.
So this is where the walk ends: not at the museum door with its famous number, but here, in a quiet street of doctors, where a man with no patients invented the most famous detective in the world. You have followed poets who eloped, a novelist who conjured Scrooge, Beatles who ran and wrote and dreamed. Marylebone keeps its secrets politely... but, as Holmes would say, you only have to observe.