17 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Sherlock

Screenshot of the pivotal “Sherlock” Season 3 scene involving the empty houses in Leinster Gardens. (Photo: BBC)

The Empty Houses in Leinster Gardens Are Real

One of the big moments in Sherlock’s Season 3 finale involves a confrontation between Sherlock, John and Mary that takes place at a fake house in a London neighborhood. The “house” is a false front set up to look indistinguishable from the rest of its neighbors. And the idea so fantastical that you have to assume that this story point was something that Moffat and Gatiss just made up.

Well, not so fast. The empty houses on Leinster Gardens not only provide a perfect shoutout to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original story, but they’re also are real. This street, in the Bayswater section of London, features two false facades at numbers 23 and 24. Their five-story false fronts conceal an infrastructure issue from the early days of the London Underground. In the 1860s, the early Tube had steam-driven trains, and the large gap behind the building allowed space for the engines to vent off steam outside. This practice helped keep the tunnels and stations free of smoke. And the false fronts helped hide the unsightly practice from area residents because, after all, this was kind of an upmarket area.

If you’re looking at the buildings from the street, you can easily spot the fakes. How? All the windows are greyed out. There are also no letterboxes on either front door. You can still see down to the tracks below from the rear of the buildings today. The Underground’s District and Circle lines run there now.