Author: Richard Jones

The images that random photographers have left us that provide glimpses into the slums of the 19th century Metropolis are, in many, ways vivid and haunting in equal measure. They capture brief moments in time of long ago […]

There can be no doubt about it. The area surrounding Brick Lane in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s was a rough and dangerous area. Notwithstanding the Jack the Ripper murders, the streets in the area where the […]

Today when we talk about crime in 1888, the chances are that we are discussing the Jack the Ripper case, or at least the generic Whitechapel Murders. Indeed, the fact that this murder spree became so well known […]

On the 8th September 1888, the body of Annie Chapman was found in the backyard of number 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields; and the killer we now know as Jack the Ripper had claimed his second victim. It is […]

The Working Lads’ Institute – or at least the building that was formally the Working Lads’ Institute – still stands on Whitechapel Road, close to Whitechapel Underground Station. It was here that the inquests into the deaths of […]

A point that I have made consistently in my blogs on the Jack the Ripper case is that, today, we tend to take the murders out of the context of the era and area in which they occurred. […]

Although the actual Jack the Ripper murders took place over a relatively short period of time – some might say as short as between August 31st 1888 to 9th November 1888, whilst others might attribute a longer reign […]

In early October 1888, the inquest into the death of Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes got underway in a room above the City of London mortuary in Golden Lane. Catherine had been murdered on the 30th of […]

Ask many people today to conjure up a mental image of Jack the Ripper, and, the chances are, in many of those images he will be holding a leather bag. Indeed, it is safe to say that, largely […]

If, as is generally believed, but is no way certain, Mary Kelly, who was murdered on 9th November 1888, was the last of Jack the Ripper’s victims, then the murders had finished by mid-November 1888. But that knowledge […]