Description:A riot, a back garden burial,the deepest canal in Birmingham, a giant dog with luminous eyes. The company that has just bought Baskerville House has also taken over an awful lot of history. The dog we can assign to the category marked apocryphal, although its an interesting point of speculation nevertheless. Arthur Conan Doyle, medical doctor and creator of Sherlock Holmes, was living in Birmingham when he wrote his first short story about the famous detective. Its said that he took the name of a famous local landmark and converted it into the owner of a Dartmoor estate, who had an unpleasant brush with a dog from hell. But if the Hound of the Baskervilles lies in the swamp of fiction, the house of the Baskervilles is real enough. It was the residence of John Baskerville, the most famous printer of the 18th Century. Baskerville’s house and garden on Easy Row was also his workshop, and here he printed and published many of the greatest books of the age. His nearest neighbours, well out of ear-shot, were Mr and Mrs Lloyd (of banking fame). Mr Baskerville was also, it has to be admitted, something of an eccentric. On his death, not only did his wife take over the printing business, she also had to deal with the fact that her husband was buried in their back garden. John Baskerville’s aversion to the church was so strong that he specified in his will that he did not wish to be interred in consecrated ground, but preferred to be laid to rest in a pyramid in his garden. The house and printing works did not survive long. In 1791 they were burnt down by a mob during the Priestley Riots, and one rioter was killed when the building collapsed on him whilst he was raiding the wine cellar. As for Mr Baskerville, he slept soundly through all the noise. Only when they came to cut a canal through the grounds in 1812 was he rudely awoken by a bunch of navvies, who were even more surprised than Mr Baskerville himself. The building we know as Baskerville House bears no relation to any of this. In the 1920s the council bought up the site - which by then was a collection of factories, warehouses and canal wharves - with the intention of creating a vast civic square. A model of what the square would have looked like is in the Museum & Art Gallery, but a model it remained. Baskerville House was still only half-built when war intervened. By the time the planners could return to the idea, grand civic squares were no longer in fashion. Only the Hall of Memory, an arcade and Baskerville House itself were completed. Once it re-opens as a hotel, the first guests will be occupying one of Birmingham’s most eventful and privileged locations. Lets hope they don’t hear a strange scratching at the door.