During filming, the flat door is removed and replaced with the famous 221B, but the exterior of the cafe remains unchanged in the final series – though the frontage was altered in the Pilot episode to Mrs Hudson’s Snax. Following completion of filming on Series two, the 221B door is now a permanent fixture outside, complete with the distinctive door knocker and letterbox.
Interiors for 221B in series one and two were filmed at Upper Boat Studios in Cardiff, a BBC Wales production facility that closed in 2011. BBC Wales interior filming now takes place at the new Roath Lock studios in the city, and the base will most likely become the new home of 221B for the filming of series three.
In March 1837, Giuseppe Mazzini (Italian politician, journalist and activist for the unification of Italy) moved to 187 North Gower Street (at the time, 9 George Street) together with Italian poet and patriot Giovanni Ruffini, his brother Agostino Ruffini and Angelo Usiglio, living there for three years until 1840.
The site of the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson in both Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories and in the BBC Series, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, also known as St Bart’s, is the oldest standing hospital in England. It survived both the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz in the Second World War. St Bart’s was also the site of the execution of the Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace, and there is a plaque on the hospital’s exterior wall near the spot. St Bartholomew’s Accident and Emergency Department was closed in 1995, yet the hospital remains as a centre of research and learning, primarily into cardiac care and cancer research and treatment.
One of the hospital’s many chemical research labs was the site of the meeting of Holmes and Watson – the interiors for this, and all subsequent interior scenes, were filmed in Cardiff. However, the exterior of the building, most notably the publicly inaccesible roof, were the site of dramatic scenes in Series two.[sherlockology]