Topic
‘To Produce a Realistic Effect’: The Process of Mapping Sherlock Holmes’s London
This paper presents findings from an AHRC Follow-on funded project, Steampunk Sherlock Holmes, which developed a large-scale, navigable Minecraft model of Victorian London in collaboration with the design studio Blockworks. The project sought to translate Charles Booth’s late nineteenth-century poverty maps into an explorable digital environment, while embedding the narrative pathways of Sherlock Holmes within this reconstructed city.
In order to achieve this, the research developed a method for mapping Conan Doyle’s stories onto historical cartography. This involved identifying named places within the texts, tracing narrative movements across the city, and aligning these with layered nineteenth-century maps. The first part of the paper, then, will outline this process in practical terms, showing how literary narrative was plotted as spatial data and then transformed into a three-dimensional digital build.
The second part of the paper reflects on the research questions that emerged from this process. When Holmes’s journeys are plotted in detail, they reveal a distinctive spatial logic. Conan Doyle combines real-world place names with invented or altered locations, producing a London that is recognisable yet not fully correspondent to historical geography. At the same time, the routes Holmes takes across the city are consistently coherent and can often be reconstructed with an assumed precision. This produces a form of spatial verisimilitude grounded in movement rather than fixed location.
And yet, mapping these journeys also brings into focus the problem of ambiguity. Many routes are only partially specified in the texts, leaving multiple possible paths between points. In response, the project experimented with different methods of representing uncertainty, including alternative routes and graded levels of probability. This raises broader questions about how literary space can be visualised without imposing false precision.
The paper concludes by proposing a shift from cartographic to topological approaches to literary mapping. Rather than seeking exact geographic correspondence, a topological model focuses on connections, sequences, and relational patterns within the text. This approach aligns more closely with the way narrative space is constructed in the Holmes stories, where meaning emerges through movement, encounter, and spatial logic rather than through fixed coordinates.
By tracing the movement from textual narrative to digital reconstruction and back to critical interpretation, the paper demonstrates how practice-based digital work can generate new insights into the spatial strategies of literary texts and the narrative construction of urban space.
Rebecca Hutcheon (University of South Wales)
Rebecca Hutcheon is a Research Fellow at the University of South Wales whose work examines how urban spaces are imagined, felt and interpreted through literature and digital practice. Her research sits at the intersection of literary studies, spatial theory and the digital humanities, with a particular interest in texts and places that resist mapping or unsettle conventional spatial logics. She is the author of three books, most recently New Approaches for Digital Literary Mapping: Chronotopic Cartography cowritten with Sally Bushell. Her current project, Senses of Place 1890–1930, develops this interest in embodied spatiality by exploring how writers such as May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson construct place through the nonvisual senses.