Holmes as Heritage: Readers, Tourism and the Making of Sherlock Holmes's England

Between 1983 and 2001 an American lawyer named David Hammer, a self-confessed fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, wrote a series of ‘Sherlockian’ travel guides to England. Hammer’s series provides a case study of the role that ordinary people, not authors or tourism promoters, have played in the production of heritage as a tourist commodity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The chapter argues that David Hammer used his travel guides as a means of creating Sherlock Holmes’s England as a material manifestation of the idea of Holmes as heritage, a place that could and should be visited by Sherlockian reader-tourists. He used pieces of England’s Holmes-related past – places from Doyle’s life, locations from the Sherlock Holmes stories, and even sites from his own past – to create a new story of the past for Sherlockians, one that made tourism into a necessary part of the Sherlockian reader’s experience.