One of the locations we pass on our Jack the Ripper Tour is Middlesex Street, which is better known the World over as Petticoat Lane. A constant observation that we get from participants on our walk is how wonderful it would be to be able to go back in time and see the streets as they actually were in 1888.
Well, thanks to the BFI, who have now started putting their wonderful film archive on Youtube, you can do just that and pay a visit to Petticoat Lane, on film at least.
This film shows the Sunday morning Petticoat Lane Market as it was in 1903, so we’re talking just 15 years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It is somewhat chilling to consider that many of the people whose faces you see in this short film actually lived thorough the horrors of the Whitechapel Murders and would have had their own first hand accounts of what it was like.
So enjoy this nostalgic trip down memory lane and take a look at an East End Street as it was at the time of the most infamous crime spree in history.