Murder by Gaslight

Last night I went on a Jack the Ripper walk with my brother. It was actually quite interesting and not at all crappy. Of course, each of the murder sites is now built over, but we did walk through all of the areas where the horror took place and a lot of the buildings in the area from this period are still there, including the C19th homeless shelter in Artillery Lane, where many of the women were forced to sleep on many occasions. This stands opposite a beautiful eighteenth-century Huguenot building, which today is the art gallery, Raven Row.

Our guide was particularly good on the socioeconomic situation of the period and on the descriptions of the appalling poverty of the area at the time of the murders.
 
The walking tour was mercifully free of stupid questions from dimwits in the audience, although as we walked along the dark streets, between the relevant stopping off points, a fat Australian girl chatted on endlessly and loudly to her skinny Australian friend about what she got up to in high school. Consequently, my overview of Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the late 1800s is now informed as much by what Davo said to Johnno about Kylie's tits at a barbecue in Dandenong as it is about the Ripper murders.
 
My brother told me that when he had done the same walk a few years ago, the tour guide had mentioned Queen Victoria and an elderly American man had called out, "Excuse me, sir, is that the monarch that featured in that Shirley Temple movie?"

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