The Whitechapel murders by Jack the Ripper took place in 1888 in one of the most poverty-stricken places in London. Whitechapel was an area with massive overcrowding caused by multiple reasons:

From the 1840’s farming started to become mechanised people fled to London looking for work. The Irish Potato Famine from1845 meant one million Irish people left their homes in search of a new life abroad. Some came to London, some of those later went on to America. From the mid 1800’s Jews fled fro...

Most of the candidates for Jack the Ripper have fatal flaws. For example, the queen’s doctor Sir William Gull. In 1887, Sir William Gull suffered the first of several strokes at his Scottish home, Urrard House, Killiecrankie. The attack of hemiplegia and aphasia was caused by a cerebral haemorrhage. He recovered after a few weeks and returned to London, but was under no illusions about the danger to his health, remarking "One arrow had missed its mark, but there are more in the quiver".

Over...

One of the lesser-known suspects for the Ripper murders is William Bury and his is a strange tale indeed!

He was born in May 1859, orphaned at an early age and attended a charitable school in the Midlands. After he left school, he was in regular employment for a while and then got into financial difficulties and was dismissed for stealing. He became a street pedlar. In 1887 he moved to London and met and married Ellen Elliot, who was probably a prostitute. Their marriage was stormy, punctuated...

Walking round on a Jack the Ripper walk, I am sure that most people would be wondering where all the victims of Jack the Ripper were buried. Even though most of these women were buried in common graves as their families either could not be traced or did not have the money to buy them a plot in a cemetery, it is still possible to find and visit their resting places.

Here is a list of all the graves that have been discovered up until now.

Martha Tabram - unknown but most likely common grave in th...

If you go through the Blackfriars Bridge underpass on the south bank of the Thames look out for this tiled replica of a picture which appeared in the Illustrated London News on 13 November 1869.

It was eight years since Queen Victoria’s beloved husband Prince Albert had died and since then she had been in deep mourning and had very rarely appeared in public. Her and the monarchy’s popularity had plummeted. In an effort to change this, the Prime Minister William Gladstone had persuaded her ...

Did you know Bankside’s role in the invention of one of Britain’s most iconic fashion items?

The Earl of Leicester had a problem: his gamekeepers hats kept on being knocked off as they went about their work, because in the mid-19th century gamekeepers wore impractical tall hats. He dispatched his younger brother Edward Coke to posh St James’s hat-maker Lock and Co to find a solution.

Lock and Co got in touch with a certain hat-maker’s on Bankside to design a solution.  Bankside has a lo...

I think there are many reasons why the police did not catch Jack the Ripper, even though at one time they believed that they were only five minutes behind him after the murder of Catherine Eddowes on 30 September 1888, the night of the double event.

One reason was that policing in those days was far removed from the efficient methods of today. Just imagine no fingerprinting until 1906, no crime scene analysis, no DNA, no genetic sequencing, or any of the other tools that the police now have.

On...