British Library on Tour: Sherlock's Home - Portsmouth Then and Now

New Project!

The Portsmouth History Centre is set to host a remarkable collection of letters written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on loan from the British Library as part of the British Library on Tour programme, generously supported by the Dorset Foundation.

The letters, detailing his life in Portsmouth, will be on display in the Portsmouth History Centre at Portsmouth Central Library from Tuesday 21 October until Thursday 15 January 2026.

A rare first edition of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, featuring the debut of Sherlock Holmes in ‘A Study in Scarlet’, will also be showcased alongside the letters.

To celebrate and explore this Portsmouth connection, the Conan Doyle Collection is working with community groups on a project called Sherlock’s Home: Portsmouth Then and Now – funded by the Arts Council. The project will compare Portsmouth and London in the Victorian era, other significant writers of the time and how transportation played a role in the development of written literature.

The themes are:

• Attitudes to Imperialism in Victorian Britain
• Comparing Doyle and other Victorian authors and their relationships e.g. Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde
• The comparisons between Victorian London and Portsmouth - rich v poor, overcrowding and sanitation
• Comparison of Victorian and contemporary writing
• Increased travel options in Victorian Britain, magazines (Tit Bits and The Strand) give first hand evidence to social standing and education of this time
• Creating their own creative response to these

We will be working with community groups to develop mini exhibitions, podcasts and creative responses to the Conan Doyle Collection, detailing the themes above. The community groups – Cosham Reading Friends Group, Portsmouth Black History group and the reading group for the visually impaired, will showcase their own curated exhibitions running until March 2026.

Alice Zamboni, Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library, said: ‘We are excited to continue British Library on Tour and to share the riches of the British Library’s collection far and wide across the UK. Portsmouth played an important role in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life; it is in this city that he became a published crime fiction writer and developed the character of Sherlock Holmes. Thanks to British Library on Tour, the three Conan Doyle letters on loan from the British Library are now revisiting the place where they were first written.’