thestreetnames

Well, I finally got around to watching Season 3 of ‘Ripper Street’ and I’ve made it partway through the third episode. I used to really enjoy it when the storyline was intertwined with historical events and people, like early photography and John Merrick. Now it seems to me to be just a period soap opera with lots of blood and implausible story lines. And it wasn’t even filmed in London.

But there really was an Inspector Abberline who was involved in the Jack the Ripper murders, and by coincidence, I also recently saw a ‘Ripper’ documentary. That laid the blame for the murders squarely at the feet of one Charles Lechmere, a witness to the murder of Polly Nicholls. So that all got me thinking about Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel, and some of the streets involved in those grisly murders.

First, Flower and Dean Street, which no longer exists, although the name lives on in Flower and Dean Walk. The street (along with Thrawl and Dorset Streets) was a squalid centre for doss houses in the 19th century, particularly favoured by prostitutes. Two of the Ripper’s victims – Elizabeth (Long Liz) Stride and Catherine Eddies – lived in Flower and Dean Street.

At the height of the Ripper attacks the philanthropist Thomas Barnardo visited the house where Stride lived and, days later, wrote to the The Times, saying, “Only four days before the recent murders I visited No. 32, Flower and Dean-street, the house in which the unhappy woman Stride occasionally lodged.”

The women, he said, were frightened by the Whitechapel murders and one of them said, “Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anybody had helped the likes of us long ago we would never have come to this!”

How right the anonymous speaker (some say it was Stride herself) was: as Barnardo said, four days later Stride was found in Berner Street (now Henriques Street, and where Charles Lechmere once lived with his mother) relatively unmutilated, compared with the Ripper’s other victims.

Stride had suffered merely a cut throat and a nicked ear – due, the theory goes, that her killer was interrupted at his work by the man who discovered her still-warm body.

Not one to be easily thwarted, the Ripper then proceeded on to Mitre Square where he was able, uninterrupted, to kill Eddowes, perform his customary atrocities and – if it were him, though that is still a point of dispute – leave a cryptic message chalked on the wall. “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing” has been the linchpin of many an argument about Jack the Ripper’s identity.

Ah, yes, the street’s name comes from the fact that the street was built by two bricklayers, John Flower and Gowen Dean, in the 1650s. The land upon which it was built belonged to the Fasson brothers (who gave their name to Fashion Street). In 1677 it was known as Dean and Flower Street and in 1702 the name was corrupted to Floodrun.

In the early 20th century, conditions were little better in the area than they were in the Ripper’s day: Jack London lived in Flower and Dean Street in 1902-3 and wrote a book, The People of the Abyss, about the state of life in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields areas of London.