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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Dupin and Lecoq are fictions - the real first detective was a galley slave who ran the Surete and filed every man on a card. #TrueCrime bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/th…

Portrait of Eugene-Francois Vidocq, the convict who became head of the Surete in Paris, in grayscale.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

A book cipher priced the fortress of West Point in the pages of Blackstone's Commentaries. The code kept its secret. The boot did not. John Andre hanged while the betrayer sailed away. The Midnight Dispatch: bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/th…

The Unfortunate Death of Major Andre, engraved by John Goldar after William Hamilton for Barnard's New, Complete and Authentic History of England (London, 1783); the apron of the scaffold at Tappan, October 2, 1780.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In 1872 a Durham woman buried her stepson, dead of a stomach complaint that mentioned arsenic. Since 1852 she had buried four husbands, her mother and eleven of her thirteen children - nearly all insured. #TrueCrime bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/ma…

Portrait photograph of Mary Ann Cotton, the Durham poisoner hanged at Durham Gaol in March 1873, in grayscale.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A five-hundred-year-old codex that no one has ever read. Its dealer ran coded messages for the Polish underground - yet even he died baffled by his own prize. The cipher remains unsolved. #Voynich #Cipher bakerstreetholmes.substack.com/p/th…

A page of the Voynich manuscript, its indecipherable script and unreadable drawings, in grayscale.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The Peckham Ghost of 1872: a white figure at the Alliance Tavern, twelve-year-old Matilda Ayres fleeing the gaslight. The parish cornered the phantom at last - Joseph Munday, a labourer in smock and wig. Hell is empty; the fears of the living are not. #GhostStories #VictorianLondon

The Peckham Ghost of 1872: a grayscale period plate of the haunted lane

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The Priory at Balham, 1876: Charles Bravo, four months a bridegroom, died of antimony in a slow week and told no one how it came. Two inquests, a verdict of willful murder, and not a soul charged. The mystery kept its secret. #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon

An 1876 engraving from The Illustrated London News of The Priory in Balham, south London, the house where the lawyer Charles Bravo died of antimony poisoning in April 1876.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Cabinet piece: the Flying Man's bill — a machine of cane and silk, bat-wing and peacock-tail, to rise over Cremorne under Mr Simmons's balloon 'the Czar'. One shilling to watch. The wings proved heavier than hope: in July 1874 De Groof fell at Chelsea. #CabinetOfCuriosities

A Victorian handbill for 'The Flying Man' (printed c.1860-1870 by Frederick Bell & Co, King's Road, Chelsea): a man's bat-winged, peacock-tailed flying machine of cane and silk, to be raised by balloon over Cremorne Gardens; admission one shilling.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A melody may carry what the eye would miss. This 18th-century music cipher wheel set notes against letters, so a score read as song and whispered a code beside it. The tune itself was the key. #Ciphers #VictorianLondon

Diagram of an 18th-century music cipher wheel, c.1750, anonymous French manuscript; a wheel mapping musical notes to cipher letters.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

From the cabinet:a woodcut of Pepper's Ghost, 1863: a pane of glass anda hidden lamp cast a spectre among the living,and crowds swore they saw a ghost,though no glass was visible. What is a ghost but a trick of light played upon the believing eye? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianScience

An 1865 wood-engraving from Le Monde Illustre of Professor John Henry Pepper's stage illusion at the Royal Polytechnic Institution: a spectral white-shrouded figure appears before a startled man, its image cast through a glass screen by a lamp hidden below the stage.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

From the cabinet: the London Stone — a grey lump of oolite in Cannon Street whose purpose no man has proved. Roman mile-marker, Saxon altar, Druid relic: all said, none shown. In 1450 Jack Cade struck it with his sword and named himself Lord of the City. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

An 1831 engraved plate of St Swithin's church on Cannon Street, London — the Wren-rebuilt church in whose south wall the London Stone was kept; a period black-and-white engraving of the Georgian stone facade with its tower.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

From the cabinet: Barnum's Feejee Mermaid, 1842 — a monkey's torso grafted to a fish's tail, shown at the Egyptian Hall as sworn truth. Londoners paid to gawp; it was, of course, a hoax. What we wish to believe is itself a wonder. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

A period newspaper advertisement for P.T. Barnum's 1842 exhibition of the so-called Feejee Mermaid, a woodcut of a mermaid-like creature clutched by a dragon-mother in the woodcut style of the era.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

From the cabinet: a zoetrope strip, c.1860 - a dog printed twelve times, each frame a still. Spun in the slotted drum they blur into one motion: a moving picture before film. Horner's wheel of life, 1834, made an eye-trick of a toy. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianScience

A Victorian zoetrope strip from about 1860, showing a dog perched on its hind legs catching a ball in a sequence of still frames.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The Black Dog of Newgate. The old prison beside the Old Bailey kept a spectre: a great black hound, an omen before each hanging. Earliest account, the 1596 pamphlet ‘The Discovery of a London Monster’. The City’s warnings came in fur and shadow. #VictorianLondon #GaslightGothic

A monochrome engraving of Newgate Prison's facade with its gallows, about 1800; the London prison beside the Old Bailey where the Black Dog ghost was said to haunt.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

From the cabinet: London bricked its lost rivers into Bazalgette's sewers — the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne. This 1873 plate shows the Fleet still open by the old Red Lion before the bricking-in. What else flows, unsung, beneath our feet? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

A grayscale 1873 wood-engraving from 'Old and New London': three panels of the Red Lion tavern in Chick Lane beside the open River Fleet, the lost river that was later bricked into a sewer.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

From the cabinet: the Penny Black, 1840 — the world's first prepaid stamp. A penny carried a letter anywhere in Britain. Withdrawn within a year: the black shade could be sponged off and the stamp reused. A Queen's face, gummed by the million, undone by soap. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

From the cabinet: Babbage's Difference Engine, 1832 — an engine of brass and cog to cast error-free tables, never finished in its maker's lifetime. The one part completed still turns by candlelight. What a century might have done. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianScience

A period engraving of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine: rows of toothed brass wheels, cogged shafts and a delicate mechanical frame, drawn at a slight three-quarter angle upon a blank page; grayscale reproduction of the public-domain 1864 plate.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Cipher of the drawing-room: a message hidden in plain sight. Lord Verulam's biliteral alphabet (De Augmentis, 1623) turns each letter into five marks of two kinds - A is aaaaa, B is aaaab, four-and-twenty letters in thirty-two rooms. Solve: aabba baaaa aaaaa babba. #ParlorCiphers #Bacon

Facsimile plate from Francis Bacon's De Augmentis Scientiarum (London, 1623) showing the biliteral alphabet, two forms of each letter used to conceal a message in plain text.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Lloyd's #PennyDreadful, 1846, no. 8 — a barber in Fleet Street who keeps his cellar stairs measured. In 'The String of Pearls' the laugh runs thin, the coins jingle, and a reader counts the steps down. Sixpence buys the shudder. #VictorianLondon

Woodcut from the 1846 penny serial The String of Pearls, issue no. 8, showing the barber Sweeney Todd.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

From the cabinet: the first Christmas card, 1843 — a thousand printed by Henry Cole, a shilling apiece. Its family toasting in wine scandalised the Temperance men as a nudge to the drink. Harmless, yet offensive. Barely a score survive. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

The first Christmas greeting card of 1843, by John Callcott Horsley — a small panel showing a well-dressed Victorian family raising glasses of wine in a toast at Christmas, with the poor gifted bread on either side; grayscale reproduction of the hand-painted card, catalogued as public domain.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

From the cabinet: Faber's Euphonia, 1846 — a speaking machine of bellows, reeds and a clockwork throat that voiced whole sentences in a ghostly monotone at Egyptian Hall. Audiences heard a head converse with no mind behind it. What haunts the hollow machine? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianScience

A period photograph, circa 1846, of Joseph Faber's Euphonia talking machine — a life-size head and draped figure worked by keyboard and bellows, mounted behind its operator's console; grayscale Victorian scientific portrait on a pale ground.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

From the cabinet: Crookes's radiometer, 1873 — a glass bulb of vanes that spins when light falls on it, half instrument, half riddle. Whether that force be light or heated air was argued a decade. What unseen hand turns a machine we only watch? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianScience

A period 1876 engraved plate from Popular Science Monthly showing two of William Crookes's radiometers — glass bulbs holding dark vanes, Indian-ink scientific illustration in grayscale, thin line work on white.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

From the cabinet: a ticket of the London Necropolis Railway, 1854 — return for the living, one-way for the dead. A private funeral train ran Waterloo to Brookwood for a century. A railway built to the measure of an ending. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

A period photograph of the London Necropolis Railway terminus at Waterloo, where funeral trains to Brookwood Cemetery departed.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

A cipher card for the parlor, gentlemen. Lewis Carroll, 1868: a keyed tableau of twenty-six alphabets. Any two letters may be paired; a key word sets the offset. WIMXFJBRRZB RIVLCE Key: VICTORIAN. Two words. Solution tomorrow. #PuzzleRiddle #VictorianLondon

Lewis Carroll's Alphabet Cipher card (1868): a 26-letter keyed tableau printed in black on card, with instructions for encoding and decoding messages by sliding the alphabets against a key word. The plate bears Carroll's name and the year 1868.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

London's most haunted house sat at No. 50 Berkeley Square, W1 — a Mayfair terror. The tale told of a mad servant girl walled up in the garret for a sister's jealousy; by the gas age, night-walkers swore the upper window held a pale face that watched them pass. #LondonHistory #VictorianEra

A grayscale engraving-style plate of a shadowed Georgian terrace by moonlight in Mayfair; a pale spectral face glows in an upper window beneath a full moon.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

From the Cabinet: a tube of 'Mummy Brown'. Victorian painters prized this rich sepia, ground - so the story ran - from Egyptian dead. When supply failed by the 1860s, artists wept for the pigment, not the pharaohs. Colour has its own archaeology. #VictorianEra #SherlockHolmes

A Fayum mummy portrait from the British Museum, shown in grayscale: a painted funeral likeness set over the face of a wrapped mummy, the very tombs from which Victorian 'mummy brown' pigment was said to be gathered.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

From the Cabinet: a plate from 'Spectropia' (1864). Stare at the black figure, look to the wall - and the ghost appears. Mr. Brown proved the spectre made for parlours could be manufactured in ink. Rigor, not ectoplasm. #VictorianEra #SherlockHolmes

Grayscale plate from J. H. Brown's 'Spectropia' (1864): a printed figure designed so that staring at it leaves a ghostly afterimage on any pale wall, demonstrating spectral illusions as optics rather than spirits.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The Hammersmith Ghost, 1803. For two winters the folk of that Thames-side parish swore a dead glazier walked the churchyard, and honest men were bricked and beaten in the fog for the sin of wearing white. Fear, I find, requires far less evidence than any court of law. #VictorianEra #LondonHistory

Grayscale period-style plate titled 'The Hammersmith Ghost': a shrouded white figure looming in a dark churchyard, annotated 'An Account of the Apparition in the Parish, Hammersmith, London - in the Year 1803.'

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

From the cabinet: Temple Bar - the Wren stone gate that choked Fleet Street for two centuries, taken down in 1878 for the traffic and re-erected in a Hertfordshire field. A city gate exiled from its own city for 125 years. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

Engraving from the Illustrated London News, 1888: the old Temple Bar gate of Fleet Street, dismantled stone by stone and standing re-erected amid the grounds of Theobalds Park.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

From the cabinet: the Midland Grand Hotel, 1876 — a Gothic palace set upon the rails at St Pancras, by Gilbert Scott. Guests dined beneath vaults while engines steamed below. What grandeur a railway station may carry. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

Period print of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, London, 1876, its Gothic frontage beside the station.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

A diversion between cases, set down at noon. Each letter has been advanced three places from its truth - the oldest trick in the correspondents' trade, and still it catches out nine parlours in ten. Restore the message - solutions in the comments. #SherlockHolmes #VictorianEra

Grayscale period-style plate titled 'A Drawing-Room Cipher': a Caesar-shifted message, WKH JDPH LV DIRRW, printed on aged paper and inviting solutions in the comments.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Opened in 1843, the Thames Tunnel was the first tunnel ever dug beneath a navigable river. Marc Brunel's iron shield did the digging; his son Isambard nearly drowned in the 1828 flood. A million visitors walked through in the first fifteen weeks. Would you have queued?

An 1843 printed advertisement announcing the Thames Tunnel's opening to the public, showing three views: Brunel's great iron shield at work underground, a long section of the tunnel beneath the river, and visitors descending the staircase at the shaft.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Gilt never dries on schedule. The Albert Memorial, Sir George Gilbert Scott's 176-foot Gothic canopy in Hyde Park, was unveiled by Queen Victoria in March 1872 - but Prince Albert's gilded statue sat in the compositor's hands until 1876. What took London four years longer than promised?

A period engraving from 1872 of the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, its Gothic spire rising over Kensington Gardens.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

From the cabinet: Dr. Snow's cholera map of Soho, 1854 — a page inked with small black bars, each a death, all gathered at one street pump. He removed the handle, and the plague subsided. What truths wait on someone merely counting the dots? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

Dr. John Snow's 1854 map of Soho: an engraved street plan marked with short black bars, each bar a cholera death, clustered thick about the Broad Street pump.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall on 29 March 1871 - a dome of glass and iron rising over a district Londoners called Albertopolis, for the Prince Consort dead ten years. Some 7,000 filled the seats that night. Would you have been among them?

An engraving from The Graphic of the grand opening of the Royal Albert Hall, 29 March 1871: Queen Victoria seated beneath the great organ as the crowd fills the hall.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

From the cabinet: the launch of the Great Eastern at Millwall, 1858 — the largest ship yet put to sea, eased sideways into the Thames inches at a time; three months from ways to water. The century's grandest work began at a crawl. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

Period print of the Great Eastern on the launch ways at Millwall, 1858, crowds about her hull.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Charing Cross station opened on 11 January 1864. Sir John Hawkshaw threw one wrought-iron arch across all six platforms - 510 feet long, 164 feet wide, no columns in the way. It stood until the roof fell in 1905. Have you stood beneath the arches of an old terminus?

An 1864 engraving from the Illustrated London News showing Charing Cross railway station seen from the River Thames, its great single-span iron train-shed roof arching over the platforms.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Queen Victoria opened the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand on 4 December 1882. Its architect, G. E. Street, never saw the doors open - the work had worn him out the year before. Over the Judges' entrance, a stone cat and dog still quarrel like litigants. Would you have brought your case there?

An 1873 engraving of the Royal Courts of Justice rising on the Strand, its Gothic towers wrapped in scaffolding as the work neared.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Baker Street station, photographed in 1862 as the Metropolitan Railway neared completion - the world's first underground railway, opened 10 January 1863, steam engines running beneath the pavement. Would you have ridden a train under London before the age of the motor-car?

A photograph of Baker Street station under construction in 1862, the Metropolitan Railway cut open to the sky before its iron and glass cover was laid.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

From the cabinet: John Brown's Atlas Works, Sheffield, 1879 — a forest of chimneys where armour plate was rolled for navies and rail for empires. Stand beneath those stacks and the century inhales you. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianSheffield

A Victorian oval-vignette engraving of the Atlas Steel and Iron Works at Sheffield: rows of workshops and a thicket of tall chimneys trailing smoke, labelled John Brown & Co. Limited — the industrial heart of the steel city, 1879.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

From the cabinet: a carriage of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, 1863 - parcels driven through iron tubes by air alone. One carriage derailed under Euston Square and lay buried until 1975. What sleeps beneath a city when an idea fails? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

An engraving of a railway carriage seated at the open mouth of a large iron tube, part of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company's works.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

London filled a valley to build a street. Holborn Viaduct, opened by Queen Victoria on 6 November 1869, strides over the old Fleet ravine on iron and granite - a road carried like a bridge, decked that day with banners for her procession. Have you ever walked a street and wondered what it stands on?

An 1869 Illustrated London News engraving of Holborn Viaduct on its opening day: the iron-and-granite bridge spanning the street, crowded with spectators, as Queen Victoria's horse-drawn royal procession passes beneath between rows of guardsmen.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

August 1901, and a dead man walked again: The Strand began serialising 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', Holmes's first new case since Reichenbach Falls in 1893. Sidney Paget's drawings returned with him. Would you have queued at the news-stand for the new number?

The cover of The Strand Magazine for August 1901, announcing 'Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles' by A. Conan Doyle above a street illustration of a busy London thoroughfare with omnibuses and the dome of a church in the distance.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Electric light had a first address: the Savoy Theatre, Strand. D'Oyly Carte opened it on 10 October 1881 for Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Patience' - 1,200 Swan lamps where gas jets once hissed, the first public building in Britain lit wholly by electricity. Would you have traded your candle for it?

A Victorian watercolour of the newly built Savoy Theatre on the Strand, its red-brick and cream facade rising above horse-drawn cabs and a crowd of theatre-goers in 1880s dress.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

From the cabinet: an Illustrated London News plate, 1851 — the Koh-i-Noor caged like a songbird at the Great Exhibition. Crowds queued for hours and mostly saw a dull stone: its fire shows from one angle only. What we prize depends on the light. #CabinetOfCuriosities

An 1851 Illustrated London News engraving of the Koh-i-Noor diamond displayed inside a barred birdcage beneath the royal crown at the Great Exhibition, visitors in top hats and crinolines peering at it from both sides.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

London's newest bridge was, in September 1892, an 11,000-ton steel skeleton still dressed in scaffold. Tower Bridge took eight years to build, its great bascules raised by steam engines, and the Prince of Wales opened it on 30 June 1894. Would you have queued to see it lift?

A black-and-white photograph of Tower Bridge under construction, 28 September 1892: bare steel girders climb between the stone towers, cranes crowd the walkway, and steam launches lie idle on a still Thames.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

From the cabinet: an Edwardian postcard of the Old Bailey, raised where Newgate Prison stood. Above its door a carved charge: 'Defend the Children of the Poor, Punish the Wrong-doer.' Justice handed two duties at once — and a building asked to hold them both. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

A colour-tinted Edwardian postcard of the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of London — its dome and stone portico rising above a busy street of hansom cabs and passers-by, built upon the site of old Newgate Prison.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

By 1695, half the silver had been shaved off England's coins. Clippers swung from the gallows, and the Mint hired Isaac Newton as Warden to hunt them. The Great Recoinage of 1696 then struck every coin in the realm anew. Would you have trusted a shilling trimmed to three-quarters?

Two silver shillings of King James I side by side: the first whole and handsome, the second nibbled round the rim where clippers took their toll.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

6 November 1869: Queen Victoria drove across the new Blackfriars Bridge and declared it open. Its predecessor had charged a toll for a century; the replacement belonged to everyone. Iron arches, granite piers, the Thames beneath. Which London bridge do you cross most?

An 1872 engraved plate of the new Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames, iron arches, river traffic and St Paul's beyond.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

From the cabinet: Cleopatra's Needle, 1878 — an Egyptian obelisk sailing to London inside an iron pontoon, almost lost to a Biscay storm that drowned six crewmen, at last raised upon the Embankment. A monument carried by the sea it once defied. #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

A period 1878 engraving of Cleopatra's Needle — the Egyptian obelisk raised on the Victoria Embankment in London, shown against the Thames, the monument freshly erected.

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Sherlock Holmes @bakerstreetholmes.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

From the cabinet: Brunel's tunnelling shield, 1825 - an iron honeycomb of thirty-six cells, miners cutting beneath the Thames one board at a time as the river pressed overhead. What barrier yields to patience, frame by frame? #CabinetOfCuriosities #VictorianLondon

Period engraving of Brunel's tunnelling shield: miners at work in its iron cells, boring a passage beneath the Thames.

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