FASCINATING facts about Undershaw – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former Hindhead home – have been deduced by its new owner Stepping Stones School for a special exhibition at Haslemere Museum.

School business manager Anne Edward and staff member Shelley Lewis are the masterminds who pieced together a mini-history of the life enjoyed by the creator of Sherlock Holmes, while living at Undershaw, with the help of many enthusiastic Stepping Stones students, who will be relocating there this September.

The exhibition, which runs until Saturday, June 25, starts in the 1890s, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle relocated to his new “dream“ home, which he described in glowing terms in a letter to his mother.

He wrote: “If we could have ordered Nature to construct a spot for us. We could not have hit upon anything more perfect.”

Early postcards and copies of historical documents give a flavour of Hindhead at the end of the 19th century and the continued and growing popularity of Sherlock Holmes is traced in first editions, film posters and recent publications.

A star exhibit is the loan of Aardman Animations’ larger-than-life Shaun the Sheep, decorated as the great detective, complete with deerstalker hat, which was one of the many customised “Shauns” auctioned last year by the company to raise money for sick children.

Appropriately, it prominently features a reference to ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’, which was written at Undershaw.

A timeline with images of key events painted by pupils from the 1890s onwards is included in the show, which museum visitors are invited to add to.

Also on display, are Stepping Stones’ plans for Undershaw, together with its plans for improvements to the garden at the school’s current location nearby, in a grade two listed church in Tower Road, which will continue to be the lower school.

In a slightly spooky historical coincidence, it was on September 9, 2004, that Stepping Stones opened in Tower Road, and it will be on September 9, 2016, when it will be officially opened by South West Surrey MP Jeremy Hunt, at Undershaw.

In another twist of fate, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave a talk in January 1899 at Hindhead Free Church, the school’s future home.

“A lot of this exhibition will go back to the school to be exhibited at Undershaw, where we are also planning to hold literary events in the holidays,” Mrs Edward said.

“We have all learned so much about the history both of the two sites and the school, working on this exhibition.

“It includes a Sherlock Holmes board game donated to the school by a local resident, a Lego model of his Baker Street home from the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and recent ly published titles by MX Publishing, which is donating its proceeds to the school.

“We want to show the public we are doing something we really believe in and we want the Tower Road site to go forwards with as much love and care as the Undershaw site.