The London Traveler

The Museum of London has just opened a new exhibition on Jack the Ripper and the East End.

Rather than trying to solve the problem of just who the Ripper was - Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, Lewis Carroll, Queen Victoria’s surgeon Sir William Withey Gull, Walter Sickert - the exhibition looks at the human stories behind the legacy of myths.

You feel suddenly very close to Jack the Ripper when you hear recordings of people who grew up in the East End at the time talking about their experiences.

Meticulous maps show you the slum maze of alleyways with their doss houses and tenements. But as a journalist, I personally find one of the most intriguing features of the exhibition the way it shows that the media set the agenda - but were also caught up in a frenzy trying to get the latest scoop, the latest titbit of information or speculation. You might think such media madness is a modern invention - it’s anything but!

We will probably never know who the Ripper really was. But he’s become an icon of London - one of our most famous former inhabitatants. And he did, in the end, do some good. So shocked was Victorian society by the appalling standards of living in the slums of the East End, that there was a philanthropic drive towards clearing the slums and providing decent houses for the working classes.

Go and set the Ripper in his context, and you’ll understand Victorian London. Then wander back from Docklands through Whitechapel and Brick Lane, and you’ll see poverty hasn’t entirely gone away… the city still has its dark side.

Where: The Museum in Docklands, West India Quay

When: 10-6 daily

How much: £7 adults, £5 concessions and under 16s

Photo credit: Ben Scicluna on Flickr