London is famous for its historical landmarks. It is one of the many things that makes this city so great. Be it a pub, a castle, a bridge or a park, they all speak of the countless tales of the past that infuse London with its unique character. These landmarks can be famous or infamous – and modern-day tourists rarely mind why and what made a building famous!
Among London’s landmarks are its historic pubs. Of the 3000 or so pubs in the capital, dozens are venerable institutions with names, sites or even buildings dating back hundreds of years. Pints have been pulled in some of these places since Tudor times.
Few parts of London are as closely associated with pubs as the East End – the spiritual home of cockney Londoners – and they loom large in history because of the part they played in the Jack the Ripper Murders. Pubs where victims, witnesses and suspects were seen as the case progressed were mentioned in the press and police reports. Whitechapel alone had 45 pubs in 1888 – virtually one on every corner of major roads – and some of them are still in business today. One of these is the Ten Bells pub, Whitechapel.
The Ten Bells would be historically significant without any links to Jack the Ripper, as one of the East End’s oldest surviving pubs. The pub was first recorded in the middle of the 18th century but may well have been there for some time before that. It was then known as the ‘Eight Bells’, after the number of bells in the historic Christ Church across the street. By 1800, it had become the Ten Bells when two new ones were installed in the church – since then the church has held as many as 12 bays and now it has eight, but the pub name remains.
The original building was demolished in 1851 when Commercial Street was built through the area at this time. It was rebuilt in a new building a few metres from its original location and this is the pub you can visit today, still a well-preserved example of a typical mid-Victorian London pub. A classic ‘East End boozer’.
The Ten Bells is actually in Spitalfields. It stands at 84 Commercial Street on the corner of Fournier Street, on the other side of which are the square and steps up to Christ Church – the pub and the church are two of the very few buildings in the area that have survived slum clearances, the Blitz and redevelopment.
The pub was certainly open and thriving in the fraught days and nights of late 1888. It lies halfway between the locations of the murder of Annie Chapman on Hanbury Street and Mary Jane Kelly in her room off Dorset Street.
Kelly is especially associated with the Ten Bells – the entrance to Dorset Street would have been clearly visible from the pub and it was the most prominent and prestigious pub in the vicinity. It is known that Kelly was a customer in the Ten Bells – she drank in the pub with a friend the evening before her murder in the small hours of November 9. One local witness said that she also solicited clients as a prostitute outside the Ten Bells and she was known for fiercely defending her ‘patch’.
Annie Chapman was also reportedly seen in ‘a pub near Spitalfields Market’ on the morning of her death (September 8) which, given the notability of the pub in the local area, is often said to be the Ten Bells. It’s also very likely that more of the ‘canonical five’ victims of Jack the Ripper visited the Ten Bells – a well-known, popular and well-trafficked pub in the area – during the summer and autumn of 1888.
It has often been supposed that Jack the Ripper himself visited the pub, either to fortify himself against the cold on his wanderings in the late night and early morning or to find his unfortunate victims. The pub is only a short walk from the site of Flower & Dean Street – now erased by redevelopment, but in 1888 a notorious slum that modern analytic techniques have suggested as the most likely place where the Ripper based himself in Whitechapel.
Today, the Ten Bells is worth visiting as a well preserved and lovingly restored example of a typical Victorian London pub. The interior is largely original, making it not only an attraction in its own right but very evocative of 1888.
In 1976 the Ten Bells became a bar called ‘The Jack the Ripper’, making much of its history and the area’s most infamous criminal. The interior included display cases with information and artefacts relating to the Whitechapel Murders.
The name was increasingly inappropriate and a long campaign by the Reclaim the Night movement (promoting the safety of women in public spaces) succeeded in having the original name restored in 1988. By then, the Docklands were being regenerated and new customers working in the finance industry enabled the establishment to become a pub once again.
When the Ripper-themed décor and disco lighting were removed in the 1980s, the pub’s Victorian interior emerged intact. Original woodwork in the bar, walls and ceiling has been recently restored, along with striking blue and white patterned ceramic wall tiles.
The most eye-catching feature is a huge painted tile mural, dating from the late 19th century and showing ‘Spitalfields in ye Olden Time’. It has now been joined by a partner, ‘Spitalfields in Modern Times’, featuring a 21st century scene.
Although the pub’s current owners do not lean as heavily on its connections to Jack the Ripper and his victims, this history still draws visitors. The pub was featured in the 2001 film ‘From Hell’, with stars Johnny Depp (as Inspector Frederick Abberline) and Heather Graham (as Mary Jane Kelly) drinking in the Ten Bells. However, the building seen on screen was an on-set recreation, albeit an authentic one.
If you’d like to find out more about the suspects and Jack the Ripper, then why not join us for a tour across the East End? The Ten Bells is just one of many locations on our Jack the Ripper tour of London; explore 1888 Whitechapel through our Ripper-Vision technology by booking yourself onto a tour today.
![Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]](https://thejacktherippertour.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect1.jpg "Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]")
