Marylebone

A village high street in the middle of London, with a concert hall, a great collection and Sherlock Holmes's address.

The name is a contraction of St Mary by the bourne, the church by the stream, which the villagers preferred to the older name of the place because it had been Tyburn, and Tyburn meant the gallows. The stream still runs underground along the crooked line of Marylebone Lane, which is why one street in this grid of straight ones bends. Two estates built it, the Portman and the Howard de Walden, and both still own most of it, which is why the high street has small shops and not chains: a single landlord can choose its tenants. Marylebone High Street is the result, and it is the closest thing central London has to a village street. The district's other trade is medicine. Harley Street has been the address for private consultants since the nineteenth century, and the brass plates run for half a mile. For a visitor there are three unmissable rooms. The Wallace Collection, in a house on Manchester Square, holds Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier and a hall of armour, and costs nothing. Wigmore Hall, opened in 1901 behind a piano showroom, has the best acoustics for chamber music in the country. And at the top of Baker Street, at a number that did not exist when Conan Doyle chose it, there is a museum to a man who never lived.