When planning for your Jack the Ripper Tour of London it’s extremely important that you take a look at the route the company you are planning to do the walk with takes.
Many companies actually start their jack the Ripper Walk at Tower Hill Underground Station. But Tower Hill is not a particularly atmospheric or even terribly good place to begin your exploration of the Jack the Ripper murder sites.
For a start it’s nowhere near any of the murder sites. The closest location to it is Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes was murdered on 30th September 1888.
But it takes almost a good 45 minutes before the Tower Hill London walks actually reach Mitre Square and those 45 minutes are spent walking through modern, well lit streets lined by modern office blocks. Furthermore, a lot of the London walks that start at Tower Hill then only take in the site of the murder of Mary Kelly, the final victim of Jack the Ripper. So you only get to visit two Jack the Ripper murder sites, and hardly any other locations that are associated in any way with Jack the Ripper.
By contrast, our Jack the Ripper Walk begins at Aldgate East Underground station, which is right in the heart of the area. Within 1 minute of setting off we take you straight into an old East End thoroughfare where Martha Tabram, who many experts consider to have been the first of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was murdered. As you walk along this deliciously spooky alley you even pass the pub where one of the major suspects worked.
Having paused at the Martha Tabram murder site, we pass the site where Emma Smith, the first name on the Whitechapel Murders file, was attacked in April 1888 and we then see the former pub where Mary Nichols, the first definite victim of Jack the Ripper, spent her last hours on 31st August 1888.
And that’s all within the first 20 minutes of the start of our Jack the Ripper Tour.
So, if you really want to follow the Jack the Ripper story more or less chronologically, and go straight into the old alleyways that have hardly changed in the 120 or more years since the ripper roamed them, give Tower Hill a miss as you starting point and enjoy a truly atmospheric route from Aldgate East Underground Station.