The Adelphi Theatre, smack bang in the middle of London’s theatreland, holds many secrets; one of which is what happened to the leading actor of the Victorian era William Terriss? His ghost purportedly still haunts the theatre.

But what happened to William? Why did the nations’ favourite theatre actor lose his life at the hand of one of his colleagues and what happened to incite it?

After a number of short unsuccessful careers, Terriss was mistakenly identified as Prince Alfred, Queen Victo...

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...

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...

Montague John Druitt was 31 years of age at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. He had been born into a reasonably well-off family from Wimborne Dorset, and went to New College Oxford in 1876. He graduated three years later with a third-class honours degree in classics, thereafter taking up a post as a teacher at Blackheath Boys School, a boy’s preparatory school. It was a successful school, run by George Valentine who was widely respected as a headmaster.

Druitt played cricket at the M...

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...

The 23rd of April is Saint George’s day, but also William Shakespeare’s birthday (1564) and death day (1616). He was born and died in Stratford-Upon Avon, where you can visit his childhood home and actually stand in the room he was (probably) born in. As a young man Shakespeare moved to London, although scholars are not sure when or indeed why.

One of the first records of Shakespeare in London is when the drunk, drugged and hugely bitter critic Robert Greene in 1592 refers to the new write...

Well, London's first two theatres were built in Shoreditch. The first theatre was built in 1576 and was called The Theatre, not only London's first ever permanent Playhouse. And it was also Britain's the benefit of shortage, much like Southern was that it was just outside the walls of the city of London.

Even though plays were highly censored. The mayor of London had banned players from being performed within the City walls, but he couldn't ban them out of it. Before specific theatre buildings...

Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's Henry VIII was originally a script called "All is True", which was a historical thriller. The play was based on the divorce of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Sir Thomas Lovell is a minor in the play. He's present at the Duke of Buckingham's trial and execution, and also at the festivities at Wolsey's residence. Later on in the play, Lovell is accosted by Bishop Gardner while he's on his way to inform the King that queen Anne is in labor, but may not su...

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...

All the victims of Jack the Ripper had a few things in common. They were all poverty stricken, all lived in Whitechapel at the time of their death, and they were all alcoholics.

Most were around or over the age of 40, so these were prostitutes at the end of the line. This includes Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. All of these were over 40, except Martha Tabram who was 39, (strangely enough this was the amount of stab wounds inflicted on her ...

According to the book Portrait of a Killer, Jack The Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell, Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, the murderer who stalked the streets of Whitechapel in 1888.

Patricia Cornwell went to a great deal of trouble and expense trying to prove her theory. She even spent about £1million in the attempt. She bought Sickert’s desk and cut some of his paintings out of their frames, desperately searching for DNA from blood/skin shreds she hoped to find on the edges of th...

On this day in 1952 Agatha Christie's play "The Mousetrap" opened in London at the Ambassadors Theatre and has played at the St Martin's Theatre since 1973. In 1954 she became the first woman to have three plays running in London at the same time.

Agatha Christie was a prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays and is best known for her series of crime books featuring detectives Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple.

The Agatha Christie memorial on Cranbourne Street near Leicester Square tube...

James Maybrick, a cotton broker from Liverpool, did not become a suspect until 1992 when a diary written on part of a Victorian ledger was rumoured to have been found by Tony Devereux, in the attic of Battlecrease House, Aigburth in Liverpool, the former residence of Maybrick. He supposedly gave it to a friend Michael Barrett in a pub, but the story later changed as his wife Ann said it had been in her family for generations. She had asked Devereux to give it to her husband because he had lit...

 A man of dubious character to be sure, as at 15 he was selling pornographic books and papers on the canal packet boats. He apparently disappeared from the area, returning years later he advertised he was ‘a great physician’, but he was really a man who sold potions from the back of a wagon. One of these, for pimples, was very effective and made him a fortune.  A boastful flamboyant man, who held sumptuous dinner parties in his tastefully furnished apartment in Washington, intimate with m...

Just north of the Tower and in front of Trinity House stands the Mercantile Marine Memorial, which was built to commemorate the merchant seamen killed in the Great War.

It is a vaulted passage way with three bays, and with Doric columns.The dead are listed under the names of their ships on bronze plaques on the walls. It was designed by Edwin Lutyens, with the sculpture by William Reid Dick. Reid Dick’s other work includes the boy and goose on Lutyens’ headquarters for the Midland Bank, no...