I thought I’d write a little about the locations I used for the pictures taken in London. Some of them were obvious and relatively easy. My first photo, which was taken very early on before I was even sure how I was going to use the pictures, simply involved a short walk from Euston Station to North Gower Street, the location of Baker Street in the BBC series. Luckily there was a gap in the parked cars, so apart from the mild indignity of having to get down on my knees in the street, it was a relatively easy picture to take.
Later on, I decided I wanted another shot of Speedy’s cafe and the entrance to 221B Baker Street. This meant getting a lot closer.
Thankfully, no Speedy’s customers were sitting outside, so I got a clear shot without any humans in it, and didn’t make too much of a fool of myself. I was very pleased with the shot, and went into Speedy’s for breakfast to celebrate!
(Speedy’s from the inside, for those who’ve never seen it!)
Luckily I live quite near London and have family there, so it’s easy to fit in a quick photoshoot when I’m visiting. Some of them were easy to locate, using the guidance in the Sherlockology site (I’m having trouble getting this to open and am wondering if it’s been shut down). This led me to Eaton Square in Belgravia, which is so smart and expensive I thought I might get arrested for photographing people’s houses. However, I found Irene Adler’s house, crouched down on the pavement and got the shot I wanted, despite the Irene toy being very unsteady on her feet! Here she is, having just received pictures on her phone of Sherlock in a sheet going to Buckingham Palace…
The Diogenes Club, Mycroft’s home from home, was actually the British Academy. This is a very central location just off Pall Mall, which is right for the Diogenes Club in the books. I had some trouble getting the perspective right on this one.
In the end, I stood him on a bicycle parking meter and managed to get enough of the building in for it to be recognisable from the TV series. This isn’t a scene from the series, just my imagining of Mycroft after John had been to see him and upset everybody in the club by talking to them:
In The Blind Banker, Sherlock takes John to the head offices of Shad Sanderson, an imaginary bank in the City of London. In fact he takes him to Tower 42 in Old Broad Street, once the headquarters of the National Westminster Bank and now the site of offices and restaurants. This is right in the heart of the financial quarter, and not generally full of people taking photographs of toys, but I decided to brave it out.
This one, of John and Sherlock leaving the building, was quite easy, apart from the complication of balancing the toys on the rounded top of a bollard and hoping they didn’t fall off:
But I wanted a photo to show just how tall the building really is. I take all these photos with an iPhone, so there is a lot of screen-tapping to get the focus on the right part of the picture and the lighting right. It took an awful lot of shots to get the toys in focus but the tower clear enough to be appreciated.
I will explore other location shots in other editions of this blog. I’m just very lucky that Sherlock is set in London and I was able to get to the actual locations so easily!
Toylocked 