Day 4 and a half: An evening with Jack the Rip-Off

Geoff reckons that title is a bit harsh and he's quite right but even so, it's not a bad play on words I reckon, so it's staying.  Overall we gave our Jack the Ripper tour a 6 out of 10 rating - slightly disappointing but occasionally informative.

We caught the train to Aldgate in the East End, and met up with the tour guide there. It was just a spit around the corner to Geoff's rabbi 6th great-grandfather's synagogue, Bevis Marks, built in 1701,where we paid homage on our last visit. (Geoff has never felt the calling himself).


Still on matters ecclesiastic, this church, at the veritable

epicentre of Aldgate, is perplexingly called "St Boltoph without Aldgate" - the sign may be more legible if enlarged - and is yet another example of the delightful quirky pomminess I love (she said, just a tad condescendingly).










               

We we're alarmed when the numbers awaiting walking tours swelled to what seemed like a couple of hundred, but there were several different tours by different operators leaving at much the same time.  Unfortunately ours was by far the biggest, with around 60 people all straggling along
behind the guy in the bowler hat in the centre lower half of this pic on the right. It was far too many people for a consummate Jack the Ripper experience and the competing noise of passing traffic and Friday night pub revellers made it difficult for him to be heard with so many people in the group. 

The point of this pic of Christchurch Spitalfield is that it's a 'white chapel' and that is why the whole area is known as Whitechapel. I never knew that! 




Another disappointing aspect is that, because there were so many of us tramping around the back streets of Whitechapel, we were unable for safety reasons to stop at many actual sites that were part of the Jack the Ripper story.  Mostly we were told to look back 100 metres, to the spot where, for example, Catherine Eddowes was last seen talking with a man in a dark suit and hat a few hours before she was found dead in some other spot that we never actually saw.  Also, very little of Whitechapel looks now like it did then. It still seems very down at heel but is mostly warehouses and Bangladeshi small businesses so it was hard to imagine the atmosphere of terror that pervaded the area over the period of Jack's rampage.

Our tour guide was very good, when we could hear him. But we did feel afterwards that we should have opted for a more comprehensive East End walking tour, which would have had smaller numbers and would have visited a range of interesting historical sites in the area. Instead we chose cheap thrills - not dissimilar to choosing to read a Murdoch publication instead of The Guardian. We were a tad ashamed of ourselves. 

Off to buy a Sat Nav shortly for our tour of the provinces next week.  The lack of a Sat Nav caused some discord in our usually harmonious relationship last time we were in visited.  We will have that covered this time.

More later today!  A xx