Marylbone, London

Sherlock Holmes Museum

The gift shop is on the main floor—where you buy the tickets—and part of it is this longish room with a curved glass ceiling, I guess formerly a conservatory. Then after you buy tickets, you go back to the front room (also part of the shop) and to your right is a door toward the front, and you open the door into a narrow hallway, with many Victorian pictures on the walls, and a staircase—a narrow staircase with small steps leading up to a landing (and wrapping around, leading to several landings and floors).

The best part of the Sherlock Holmes Museum was the sitting room, of course, and I took a couple photos just in that room, and of the bathroom at the very top, the little attic, because I liked the blue and white porcelain toilet and sink. I didn’t take any pictures of Holmes’s bedroom, even though it also had a fireplace and a Persian shoe to match the one in the sitting room. (I was trying to use my film sparingly, since I didn’t have much.) This Persian shoe was on a little round table between the bed and the fireplace. There was also a suspicious-looking brown leather bag, open on the bed, and containing vials and handcuffs. Remembering Holmes’s opium addiction, I didn’t think I saw a stash of the stuff.

The first floor you reach is Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom and the sitting room; the next two flights have wax figures of characters acting out various scenes from the stories, along with more Victorian décor. At the top of the house, there’s a short flight leading up to the bathroom, which has a narrow window overlooking rooftops, and of course the blue porcelain. A short ramp, about four feet long, leads up to a very small attic space containing a bunch of Victorian clutter, such as a suitcase.

It’s a delightful house, in any case, much like I pictured Sherlock Holmes’s house (although I didn’t picture it with the wax dummies!). I didn’t mention the “V.R.” bullet hole pattern on the wall straight across from the fireplace in the sitting room. Throughout the house, including the hallways and while you go up the stairs, you can see plenty of framed Victorian pictures, prints, even framed newspaper clippings about sensational crimes. In the corner of one room is a glass cabinet contained a voodoo poppit thing—looking like a mummified baby (much as Doyle described it) and, like so many things in the house, was accompanied by a placard with the appropriate quote. The house was built in 1815, but it reminds me of what I’ve read about Victorian London architecture, how they built upwards. Each floor was small, but there were quite a few floors. Maids carried buckets of water up from the kitchen to the bathtub—what a pain.

Working at this museum was a young woman dressed as a Victorian maid, and she said we’re welcome to sit in any of the chairs (even though they were very old). Dr. Watson showed up while we were admiring the sitting room. He wore a bright green waistcoat with a black frockcoat and bowler. He chatted with us a bit, and he asked where we were from. Whenmy sister said, “The States,” he said, “That’s a big vague. Whereabouts in the States?”
She said, “Indiana.”
He said, “Indiana. That’s much better!” He also mentioned, “You can take as many pictures as you like, and I hope you enjoy the museum.”

When we came back down the stairs, I popped back into the sitting room to take another photo, and a couple of young Japanese tourists were taking a picture of Dr. Watson seated before the fireplace. When they were done with the picture, I slipped in and got a picture of the corner with the chemistry set. As I was leaving the room, the Japanese tourists were expressing concern about how tired Watson looked, and he explained that he walked an hour and twenty minutes this morning (no doubt thanks to the Tube strike), and the tourists said, “Aaaahhhh,” pityingly. I think one of them gave him a hug, because as I was leaving the room, I heard Watson say, “You can give me a kiss, too, if you like.” He got a laugh, anyway.

A couple doors down is The Beatles Store (rather fitting, since we’re going to Tussaud’s, back down the street, today). It’s a tiny shop with lots of Beatles memorabilia—Sally bought a George Harrison poster and I looked at nearly everything but didn’t buy anything. T-shirts, magnets, bookmarks, lunch boxes, LPs, CDs, etc. Also older stuff—Beatles figurines from the 1960s. The “counter” looked like the big “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” drum, with the clerk (he was plump, wore glasses, had a somewhat messy mop of dark hair, and wore a black t-shirt) sat behind that and the register perched on top of the drum.

I think wandering around and admiring architecture is entertainment enough in London—I could do that all day. While riding the subway train into London, I saw the brick houses with low brick walls dividing the front yards, along with their wonderful chimneys with little pots along them, and I thought of the film Billy Elliot. And we even saw row houses—only distinguishable from each other by the color of the bricks—that remind me of the Narnia book The Magician’s Nephew, in which the kids live next door in such row houses and use a door or tunnel in the attic that connects the two houses. It’s scarcely a separate building, really, when they’re built right up against each other and the same size. Lots of red tile roofs, too.

Pubs tend to have rows of red phone booths in front of them, and some table and chairs, and the building is brick above the ground floor, but the front of the pub tends to be dark carved wood with a big front window.

Cabs are all the same shape, boxy vehicles, generally black, but a lot of them are bright colors (such as chartreuse or hot pink) or have colorful ads on the sides. Really, just about all of them at least have an ad on the side, if not all over.

Yesterday we had lunch at the Tas Pide, a wonderful Turkish restaurant close to the Globe, on New Globe Avenue, and tonight we had an early dinner at Little Italy, on Baker Street, just a bit away from the Holmes Museum and on the other side of the street. We had bottled water at the pub last night—one way to economize is to have only two meals daily. I don’t know how long that will continue, or how often.

When you order water in restaurants, they ask if you want still or sparkling. Still is plain bottled water, as in natural spring water, or distilled.

I saw a Royal Mail (orange letters on side, accompanied by orange crown) that was bright red. And ambulances are white, with on the back diagonal orange and yellow stripes, and mostly chartreuse on the side—also, both of the vehicles are boxy-looking vans.

We did end up on the night bus last night, but it was just an ordinary red double decker, not a purple triple-decker with chandeliers and beds. But the driver drove something like the one in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban—at least, he used the horn often.

On the ground floor of this hostel, a resident’s door has a poster of the “Have You Seen This Wizard?” front page, and it’s even a hologram and it is the version from the movie, with Gary Oldman.

Madame Tussaud’s
I was much more at home at the Sherlock Holmes Museum than at Madame Tussaud’s. My interest in the wax works museum is mainly from its historic origin. During the French Revolution, Madame Tussaud made wax likenesses of the decapitated heads of famous people like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, escaped France, and used her wax working talent to open a museum in London. It’s something that comes up in novels, like maybe a Scarlet Pimpernel novel. I first read of her when I was a teenager, and back then I actually read some of my mom’s regency romance novels. My taste in fiction has evolved since then.

The present Madame Tussaud’s museum is, I think, geared more toward modern pop culture, since there are lots of figures of modern celebrities in the first couple rooms (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance). It gets more interesting when you get to the big room in which a figure of Madame Tussaud herself stands by the door, and throughout this big room are kings and queens and other dead famous people, such as Charles Dickens, sitting and looking melancholy behind a column. I almost missed him—Queen Victoria and Disraili are in front of the column. In this big room, there are also figures of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. That made me happy. I persuaded Sally to take my picture with His Holiness. The Dalai Lama and I conspire to take over the galaxy.

There was a section called the House of Horror or something like that, only for people over the age of 18 who are not faint of heart. It was a dark, spooky dungeon with strobe lights and scary crazy people leaping out at us. I apparently was labeled an easy target, and I screamed a great deal. I was shaking, too. At the end of this, we finally came to French Revolution scenes, and even, behind glass, the wax heads that Madame Tussaud had made of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and a couple other people who met their death at the Guillotine. Robespierre might have been one of them, perhaps Marat. That was pretty much what I really came for, and it was tacked on the end.

There’s also a planetarium up the stairs, and that was free with our tickets. It wasn’t much compared to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, though it had more wax figures, in spiffy costumes—Galileo was one of them.
Tacky day.