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Media Tourism Of Sherlock Holmes Museum

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Media Tourism of Sherlock Holmes Museum
The Sherlock Holmes Museum is a museum run by a private organisation in London, England. It is dedicated to the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and was opened to the public in 1990. The building is located on Baker Street and its number is 221B. It has the permission of the City of Westminster1 to display this door number even though the buildings either side number 237 and 241. The location of the museum is close to the end of Baker Street in the centre of London.
The museum is a Georgian townhouse formerly used as a boarding house between 1860 and 1936, coincidently covering the period 1881-1904. According to the novels and short stories by Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson …show more content…

Before the creation of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, fans of the detective could only enjoy the fan culture of Sherlock Holmes by reading the stories and watching filmed dramatisations. The Sherlock Holmes Museum offers fans the opportunity to have a liminal experience with the fictional story. This is an example of media culture turning into media industry and the museum is doing very well. It is currently one of the most popular tourist destinations in London (Urry, J ,2000).
The Sherlock Holmes Museum was built for the purpose of making money. At the beginning, the founder of the museum had a plan to develop the tourist industry. As a result, everything in this museum has been designed to match tourists’ preferences. I can provide a personal example. I visited the museum myself and read the letters that the museum has received from Sherlock Holmes fans. The museum staff told me that these fans wanted to write letters to Sherlock Holmes but have no true address to post the letters to, so they address their letters to the museum. I discovered an interesting pattern when reading the letters: many were from Japanese, Korean and Chinese fans. The grammar used by these Asian fans is extremely good, their command of the English language almost as good as that of a native speaker.
I believe that the museum targets tourists from Asian countries such as China, Japan, Korea and so on, which is why they present the museum as a popular

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