Exploring the London of 1888

The London of Jack the Ripper has changed dramatically over the last 130 years. Since those dark days of 1888, the East End and the Whitechapel area have undergone a remarkable resurgence as a major focus of London nightlife, thanks to gentrification and a change in its social demographic. Where dock workers, sailors, market porters and Eastern European immigrants once lived cheek by jowl in overcrowded poverty, Whitechapel is now home to a large South Asian community and most of the residents work in managerial or professional occupations or run their own businesses.

Over the years, East London has seen it all: Political upheavals, gangland violence, mass immigration and social unrest - but it has also seen a re-birth as a trendy and artistic quarter which has reshaped our opinions of what was once the worst area in London.

One thing that would strike a modern visitor, were they suddenly transported to the London of 1888, is the sheer amount of traffic on the River Thames. The river goes largely unnoticed and unused today, but in the 1880s it was a highway by which London’s economic industry went to and from the world. This was when the London Docklands lived up to their name and were crammed with ships from all over the world, moored up in rows alongside warehouses and wharves. Downwind and downriver of the more affluent parts of town, the East End was a hub of industry, supplied by and supplying the docks. And mingled in among the factories, workshops, tanneries, meatpacking plants, dye works, refineries and coal yards lived those who worked there – and those with no work at all.

The East End was home to around 900,000 people in the 1880s, and around 76,000 of them lived in Whitechapel, an area of less than 1.5km squared (350 acres). The daytime population of the district was estimated at about 100,000 people.

British agriculture had been in a depression since the 1870s and Eastern Europe was being swept by famine and pogroms. This meant that thousands of people came to London looking for work, and thousands of them packed into an already crowded East End – in Whitechapel there was an average of seven people to every dwelling room. With no planning and few regulations, Whitechapel was a dense and haphazard maze of streets, dead ends, courtyards, alleys, passageways and tunnels. Lighting was minimal and what was there was often badly maintained and consisted of flickering gas lamps behind filthy glass. On moonless nights between rows of tall buildings on narrow streets, it was often pitch black at street level.

There are still pockets of this Old Victorian London left that would be familiar to Jack the Ripper and his unfortunate victims. We visit them every night on our famous Jack the Ripper tour. While their surroundings have changed, often beyond recognition, our guides can point out cobbled streets, time-worn pavements, buildings with Victorian details and walls of weathered brickwork that survive from the fear-filled days (and nights) of the autumn of 1888. And where the physical structures have long been replaced, these newer buildings often bear streets that still resonate over 130 years after the infamous murders, and the street patterns, corners and alleys familiar to Whitechapel’s residents of the 19th century are still there under modern tarmac and concrete.

We aim to bring you as much information as possible on the world of Jack the Ripper’s London from 1888 and its journey over the last century. We hope you will find it a useful tool for resourcing London history.