Whitechapel Alley

The East End in the 1800s

Except taken from ‘Naming Jack the Ripper’ by Russell Edwards It is just another phase: the East End has been through so many incarnations over the centuries. But the most interesting time to me is the 1880s, the era that spawned the Ripper Murders. In those times the neighbourhoods of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, as well as nearby districts like…

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Whitechapel in the 1880s

For centuries the East End had been a great melting pot, and until this massive flood of immigrants it had dealt well with incomers, but now it was stretched to breaking point, and anyone who could afford to move away did, leaving a population who were, by and large, scraping by. Survival was the key, food and lodging the most…

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Aaron Kosminski - Jack the Ripper

Don’t you think it’s time you knew my name?

Allow me to introduce myself to you. My name is Aaron Kosminski. You won’t know me by name…yet. I was born in 1865 in Poland. In the early 1880s my family escaped the Russian pogroms, and we were lucky to take refuge in London, where I lived together with my two brothers and sister in…

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