Jack The Ripper And The East End
Adults £7
Concessions and under 16s £5
Museum in Docklands ticket holders £5
Family (1 adult, 2 children) £15
Family (2 adults, 2 children) £20
Groups of 10 or more people receive a 20% discount
Includes same day free admission to Museum in Docklands (usually £5 for adults, £3 for concessions, free for under 16s).
Tickets can be booked now at www.museumindocklands.org.uk/jacktheripper or on
0844 980 2151. Timed tickets and booking fee apply.
Between April 1888 and February 1891, eleven women were brutally murdered in London’s East End. The blood-red signature on a letter to the press gave the killer a name that has become an indelible part of London’s identity: Jack the Ripper.
Museum in Docklands is returning to the scene of London’s most infamous crimes, with its major new exhibition, Jack the Ripper and the East End. Bypassing salacious speculation and whodunit sleuthing, the exhibition opens a new path by looking at the human stories behind the sensational accounts. Bringing together surviving original documents for the first time, including police files, photographs, and letters from the public, Jack the Ripper and the East End maps the world which witnessed the murders and was transformed by them. It explores the complex legacy of myths and legends which have become central to London’s imagining of itself.
Museum in Docklands’ retelling of the Ripper story sees the East End take centre stage. Visitors will be able to follow the crimes and the investigation as they unfolded and understand more about the lives of the victims, witnesses, suspects and police, and about the labyrinthine world they inhabited. For the first time the public can see the original reports of the policemen who discovered the victims’ bodies, the witness statements, coroner’s plans and letters from the public, including hoax confessions, that were sent in and followed up by investigating officers.
Artefacts, including Charles Booth’s meticulously drawn maps of poverty, and oral history recordings from those who grew up in the East End around the time of the murders, throw sharp light on the slums of Whitechapel and on the grim lives of their inhabitants. A wretched maze of alleyways, courts and dead-ends, filthy doss houses and dwellings, formed a landscape of poverty which shaped restless, shifting communities. Previously unseen photographs from the Museum’s archive vividly illustrate the destitution of the turn-of-the-century East End. The exhibition explores how the murders were a huge catalyst for change, creating public revulsion at the desperate state of life in the shadows of the world’s richest city.
The story of Jack the Ripper is an integral part of London’s identity. It has shaped the way London and in particular the East End is imagined. The exhibition will ask why the story of the Whitechapel murders continues to resonate over 120 years after the events. A wall of suspects follows the changing faces of supposed Jacks, whilst display objects, including the purported confessional diary of James Maybrick and a knife said to be the murder weapon, represent a veritable library of claimed solutions which have consistently failed to close the case.
