If you’re wracking your mind for fresh Christmas party ideas in London, you probably haven’t considered booking a Jack the Ripper Tour. The festive season and London’s most notorious crime spree do not obviously go together. But we believe that our tours, taking people through the stories, places and events of Whitechapel of the past, can make for one of the most unusual, enjoyable and memorable Christmas party ideas London has to offer.
The Victorian era left us with two starkly contrasting pieces of enduring cultural imagery: our idea of the perfect Christmas, with richly decorated trees, huge meals and surrounding yourself with friends and family…and our idea of the dark underbelly of London with fog-wreathed cobbled streets stalked by dangerous unknown figures. This is the echo of the autumn of 1888 when Jack the Ripper terrified Whitechapel and fascinated those reading about his crimes, his victims and those trying to find him in their newspapers.
Perhaps it’s just as well that there is no direct crossover between Jack the Ripper and the Christmas season. The Whitechapel murders started in the spring of 1888, the first of the ‘Canonical Five’ widely considered to be victims of Jack the Ripper was killed on the last day of August and the last was on November 9th.
Having been brought to a fever pitch of fear and excitement, Londoners waited through November for the Ripper to strike again. When he did not, the tone changed to one of criticism that the Metropolitan Police was failing to catch the murderer and increased speculation about theories as to who the Ripper was and where he had gone.
As the weeks ticked by and the weather turned colder, Jack the Ripper started to fall from the minds and news pages of London. The brief concern shown by many for the plight of those living in Whitechapel faded and thoughts turned towards Christmas and the New Year.
Things flared up again just a few days before Christmas itself, when the body of 26-year-old Rose Mylett was found in Poplar on December 20th. However, the opinion of the police doctor and the coroner was that there were no signs of violence and poor Rose had either taken her own life or strangled herself on the collar of her dress in a drunken stupor. The jury at the inquest disagreed and returned a verdict of murder by “person or persons unknown” but London was nonetheless reassured that Jack the Ripper had not returned to his appalling work.
Christmas of 1888 came and went in a normal way, even if for many in Whitechapel this was neither comfortable nor especially peaceful. While some of the more sensationalist magazines and papers ran columns speculating on where and how Jack the Ripper had spent his Christmas, most seemed content to let the horrors of late summer and autumn alone and await more definitive and positive events of the country’s most famous criminal’s capture – events that would never come.
If you’re looking for different and fun Christmas party ideas in London, then you should consider one of our Jack the Ripper Tours, whether you’re organising a party for your workplace, your circle of friends, your housemates or your family. It will certainly stand out from the normal crowded restaurant, clichéd disco and improvised pub crawl. It may not seem like a typical way to get into the Christmas spirit, but spooky tales and ghost stories have long been part of a traditional English Christmas, and one that the Victorians took delight in rediscovering and embracing.
Wrapping up and getting out onto the cold streets of the East End will put people in a festive mood, and a winter’s evening certainly adds to the atmosphere – when combined with our guides’ knowledge, storytelling and our Ripper Vision projection technology, the dark streets of Whitechapel will really come to life.
Beyond the core tour of the key locations of the Jack the Ripper murders, the story of those infamous nights in 1888 and the people involved, we can tailor your event to your requirements to make it one of the most memorable and enjoyable things to do in London for a work Christmas party.
You can’t tell the full story of Victorian Whitechapel and the Ripper murders without at least mentioning the district’s pubs – some of the ones that were visited by the Ripper’s victims or mentioned in the original police reports are still in business. We can include stops at some or all of these in the tour as a chance to warm up, change the mood a little and start talking over your favourite theories.
If you want to add a gently competitive element or some team building to your work Christmas party, we can round off the evening with a quiz (in a suitably warm and festive location). Or maybe your people can take the role of detectives, and each try and come up with one name as their best deduction for the identity of Jack the Ripper by the end of the night?
There are few people who haven’t at least heard of Jack the Ripper and aren’t at least a bit curious about what remains one of the world’s most infamous murder mysteries. One of our tours will take you right to the spots where these events unfolded, and our guides will transport you back to those dark times in 1888. It will be a Christmas Party like no other, and one you’ll talk about and remember for a long time afterwards.
An evening with Jack the Ripper Tours really is one of the most original and quirky work Christmas Party ideas London can offer. We’d love to work with you to put together a night you and your colleagues will enjoy. Contact us today.
![Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]](https://storage.googleapis.com/wp-static/thejacktherippertour.com/uploads/cache/2016/11/Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect1/1we6frrhqtmszmvt.jpg "Jack-the-Ripper-Suspect[1]")
