Sherlock Holmes and the case of the property developers

Victorian Society fights to save Conan Doyle's house
Undershaw as it is today. Photograph: Kathryn Ferry/Victorian Society
There is a poignant timeliness in the recent news of a planning application to break up Undershaw, Arthur Conan Doyle's former house in Hindhead, Surrey, into several smaller homes. It was entirely because of Doyle's first wife Louise, known as Touie, that the house came into being; and it was exactly 100 years ago this week, on July 4 1906, that she died there.

In 1893, Touie had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and given a few months to live. Doyle, accepting the diagnosis but refusing the prognosis, kept her alive for an astonishing 13 years. He also helped avert the life of sedentary blanketed exile that the tubercular of their generation and class were normally driven to. A chance conversation with Grant Allen (like Arthur a novelist, like Touie a consumptive) suggested that an English life was possible in the dry, sheltered microclimate of upland Hindhead - the Little Switzerland of Surrey, as it was then known.

Nowadays, with the Portsmouth road thundering past the narrow driveway down to the house, it is the impurity of the air and the lack of recuperative calm that you first notice. But the house itself, built across the top of a narrow, tree-lined valley, still has much the the grand solidity of a century ago. It has - unlike Doyle's enduring reputation - fallen on hard times, even before the developers' initial proposal to turn it into 13 flats. When I visited it a few years ago to research my novel Arthur & George, it had been turned into a themed restaurant. Gloom, candlelight and Slovakian waiters gave it more of a Halloween than a Sherlockian feel; staying the night there was a rather grim, damp and lumpy-mattressed business. You felt like propping a chair against the door knob, and half-expected the howl of an enormous hound from the woodland. After the restaurant closed, the house was left to decline, and for three years has been approximately boarded up, almost inviting vandalism.

The decade Doyle spent at Undershaw saw him at the height of fame. In 1895, the year he bought the land for the house, he started publishing The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, in the Strand magazine. It was here that he gave Sherlock Holmes the literary kiss of life after that misadventure at the Reichenbach Falls: first with The Hound of the Baskervilles and then The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He wrote his history of the Boer war here. In these years he was knighted, made deputy-lieutenant of Surrey, and stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Liberal Unionist in the 1906 general election. It was also from Undershaw that he launched his campaign to clear the name of the Birmingham solicitor George Edalji.

Interfering client

Yet this is more than just a writer's house evoking memories of literary activity. Doyle was an energetic and practical Edwardian gentleman and, if less than co-designer of Undershaw, could certainly be classed as a creatively interfering client. He chose as architect a friend from his Portsmouth days, Joseph Henry Ball, who had recently designed St Agatha's, Portsmouth. Pevsner describes this church, now listed as Grade II*, as "the tour de force of JH Ball, a pupil of Waterhouse". Doyle was a demanding and impatient client - also an innovative one. He insisted, for instance, on doors that hinged both ways; not, it seems, to aid Touie, but to avoid wasting time turning a handle. He also designed for the entrance hall a double-height stained glass window containing the coats of arms of all his ancestors. This rather touching monument to personal and authorial vanity was still in place when I visited the house.

Three carers

The Victorian Society has applied to English Heritage for an emergency Grade I listing. The house, interesting and imposing though it is, may not have the architectural distinction to merit this; but there is a precedent in Charles Darwin's house, which "would be Grade II on architectural grounds but is Grade I for historical associations".

Conan Doyle is one British name that continues to play worldwide. Famous dead writers are often looked after by a literary society; a very few have two carers; Doyle is the only one I know of who has three societies devoted to his memory. At Undershaw the main downstairs rooms remain very much as he helped conceive them, and while some element of development in the rest of the building seems necessary - indeed, welcome (before the current neglect turns into dilapidation) - keeping a core use with public access would be a proper act of national thanks to Sir Arthur. Millionaire Sherlockians should contact the Victorian Society; those wishing to urge on Waverley borough council when it considers the listed building application should write before July 24 to Mrs Wright, Planning Department, The Burys, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1HR.