Author: Richard Jones

The Jack the Ripper murders did much to expose the horrific conditions under which many of the people of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were forced to exist. As the Whitechapel murders increased in their ferocity, so the appeals from […]

Hanbury Street is well known in the Jack the Ripper saga as the location of the murder of Annie Chapman, which took place in the backyard of number 29 on the 8th of September 1888. However, like many […]

One of the reasons why the police and their commissioner Sir Charles Warren found themselves so unpopular by the time the Jack the Ripper murders began at the end of August, 1888, was their heavy-handed approach to supressing […]

On Thursday, October 31st, 1850 The North Devon Journal carried the following story that illustrated yet another knife crime that had occurred in Whitechapel:- MURDEROUS AFFAIR IN A BROTHEL At the Thames Police-court on Thursday, James Daley, a […]

George Sims (1847 – 1922) was a journalist who frequently mentioned and commented on the Whitechapel murders, mostly in his “Mustard And Cress” column, which was written for the Sunday newspaper. As a personal friend of Melville Macnaghten, […]

Although it is the general consensus today that the Jack the Ripper murder spree ended with the death of Mary Kelly on the 9th of November, 1888, the people who actually lived through the horror of the Whitechapel […]

Violent crime was an alarmingly common occurrence in the streets of the East End of London, both before and after the Jack the Ripper murders. Although robberies going wrong were responsible for some of the murders, the majority […]

The Bucks Herald, in its edition of Saturday the 13th of October 1888 featured the following article about how the Whitechapel murders were being used for political ends:- POLITICS AND JACK THE RIPPER The dreadful murders in Whitechapel […]

Today the Victorian East End of London that was the haunt of Jack the Ripper is often perceived as one giant slum where the residents lived in horrific conditions, and where crime, vice, violence and drunkenness were almost […]

On Tuesday the 25th of February, 1865, The Kentish Gazette published the following article about the hardships being faced by the Spitalfields weavers and their families:- LIFE IN SPITALFIELDS AND BETHNAL GREEN Amongst all the homes of the […]