Other sites from our Tour

from top: the past is breaking through--kerbstone broken and revealing interesting roadworks underneath; Soup Kitchen; Ten Bells Pub; Magdalen Passage, leading to our hotel; the Gherkin, as our cabbie called it, in the Financial District.

More from my own Jack the Ripper Tour

from top: Ye Old Frying Pan Pub where one of the prostitute was last seen; place where one of the bodies was found; flower bed on site where Catherine Eddowes body was found; picture showing Petticoat Lane Market—in center of picture in the area of the blue covering over alley was where the bloody apron piece was found along with the words scrawled on the brick wall; a nearby alley just down the street which probably is very similar to the real one.

Sunday, October 25--Jack the Ripper

Breakfast at Wetherspoons then we changed hotels, moving around the corner for a nicer room AND AIR CONDITIONING! Only the 2nd time we’ve had air conditioning on this trip. And now we don’t need it.

So—yesterday, Colin informed me that the Aldgate area is next to Whitechapel, the area where the Jack the Ripper murders took place. I have always been interested in these murders and fascinated with movies about them for some reason. Probably the fact that “Jack” never was caught and the list of suspects was so interesting.

So I checked into the Jack the Ripper tour from Aldgate Station and found that they were totally booked for this week. So what did I do? I created my own tour—here you can see Ray rolling his eyes. I gathered together all the information on the sites involved and compiled them into a list and coordinated it with a Google map of the Whitechapel area of London and off we went. Ray had warned me that to see everything on my list would take 8-10 hours, but I was not daunted.

First we started at the Whitechapel Station and followed my directions (only veering from them when a passageway was locked and unpassable). This whole area is strongly Muslim now.

So, this afternoon we found the site where the first murder occurred near Durward Street, the Truman Brewery which sits on the site of the 2nd murder, past the old weavers area of town, to the Sheraz Indian Restaurant which was once the Frying Pan Public House (Pub) where Mary Ann Nichols was last seen staggering from its door, to 22 Mulberry Street where the leather apron was found—the first clue the Ripper left behind, to the site of a school yard where one was the entrance to Dutfields Yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found, and back around to Aldgate Underground Station and St. Botolph’s Church where prostitutes had free reign, being told by the police that if they stayed on this island—inside an area of several streets—they would not be arrested. It was called Prostitution Island.

Very near here was Dukes Place where a man saw Jack the Ripper with Catherine Eddowes on the night of her death. She was found on the site of what is now a flower bed in Mitre Square. Next we made our way over to the Petticoat Lane Market area where the markets were going full-force. In this area, Jews used to sell second hand clothes and shoes. In the doorway of the Wentworth Dwellings, a piece of bloody apron belonging to one of the prostitutes was found, used by the Ripper to wipe blood from his knife, it is thought. Here also was found the words that the Ripper left scrawled onto the brick wall in an alleyway—the words that tried to point the blame on someone in the Jewish community.

We ran across the very impressive Fournier Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, past the Old Spitalfields Market, then found our way to the Ten Bells Pub where Mary Kelly was last seen. This pub tried to cash in on the murders by renaming itself the “Jack the Ripper” Pub, but soon changed back to the original name. Then we found where she used to live on Miller’s Court, which is now only a gap in the kerbstone ¼ the way along a warehouse building behind an iron stairway—the street is no longer here. We also found the site of St. Mary’s Whitechapel, which was destroyed by bombing in World War Two. It was the Medieval custom of lime washing the exteriors of important buildings such as this that created the White Chapel which gave its name to the entire district. There came a point in our tour when I told Ray, “Okay, only one more murder to go.” “Which one is that?” he asked. “The one where I kill Colin for telling you about all this?”

We were exhausted by the time we finished our tour. In all, we had walked about 10 miles!! The tour company said that if you decided to do the tour yourself, you should not do it after dark because you will be walking through area that are not safe after dark. I could only imagine doing it at night. With the dark, narrow alleyways we went down and the fog that is common here, I am sure I would’ve been spooked. My imagination is entirely too good.

Pictures from top: buildings in the Whitechapel area, old-fashioned door bell pull, mosque

More fun with Margaret and Colin

from top: Lock and barge in Stratford; Holy Trinity Church; Margaret & Colin; Royal Shakespeare Theatre; Hatton Locks—from a picture in the pub as mine turned out too dark.

More from Saturday--Chipping Camden & Stratford

From top: really old building in Chipping Camden; inside my first Butcher Shop; thatched roof house; Anne Hathaway Cottage; tree in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Saturday, October 24--Chipping Camden & More with Margaret & Colin

And it WAS fun, lots of it. And some rain and wind. But we made the best of it. It was so good to see Margaret and Colin again. We walked to the Aldgate Metro station then to the Marylebone (pronounced without the Y, “Mar-le-bone”) Station where we had breakfast at the little café on the corner. I saw Double Scrambled Eggs on Toast on the menu and thought that meant that a regular order was only 1 egg scrambled, so I ordered the double and it must’ve been SIX scrambled eggs that arrived. It was delicious, but I had to give half of it to Ray. We boarded the train to Stratford-upon-Avon and met up with Margaret and Colin there. Since it was so crowded in Stratford, we decided to go to this charming little town called Chipping Camden. Much of the 1971 movie "Canterbury Tales" was filmed here. I fell in love with it immediately. The stone of the buildings was this honey colored gold I had never seen before. It was raining and windy as we made our way up the cutest little street to the “Badger Hall” tea room. It was a small little tea room with the old beams and timbered walls and latticed windows. I ordered the Bean and Tomato Soup with Granary Bread and butter and Hot Chocolate. The cup of Hot Chocolate was huge! And so delicious as was the soup and the tender, moist bread. The waitress was very friendly and funny and we felt so comfortable there. The whole way through the meal, this very yummy Lemon Drizzle Cake was staring at me from the dessert table. I was so glad we decided to have dessert for it found its way onto my very grateful plate.

After our meal, we walked around the city and looked into the shop windows. We found a Scott’s Cottage and a house that had an iron fox above the door—in honor of Margaret and Colin no doubt—their last name is Fox. We checked out the old Market Hall from 1627 with its stone floor and saw street signs that said Heart of England Way and Cotswold Way. The reason the buildings still look the same as they always did is that it is required that they do so. If you are renovating or repairing a building, you MUST do it exactly in the way it was done before, even if there is a better, easier, more durable way.

Then we drove back to Stratford-upon-Avon, seeing several “tree tunnel” streets on our way, and visited Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in the hamlet of Shottery. This “cottage” was really a substantial, twelve-roomed, Elizabethan farmhouse. This was the family home of William Shakespeare’s wife and where he courted her before they were married. The house was lived in by the Hathaway family for over 300 years. It has a low thatched roof, timbered walls, and lattice windows and has changed very little since Anne Hathaway’s time. Parts of the building date back further than the 15th century, using some of the earliest English house-building techniques. Upstairs we saw several beds, and I wondered which one of them was the “second best” bed that Shakespeare left his wife, Anne, in his will. Famous writers have visited here including Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens. We learned where several idioms that we use everyday come from as the tour guide showed us around the kitchen. At the end, the guide told us a very interesting ghost story about Shakespeare. So cute to watch the little girl in the corner listening so intently.

We drove into Stratford and parked in the car park so we could walk down to Holy Trinity Church, the final resting place of William Shakespeare. On the way we stopped to watch a barge going through the locks. It was fascinating. The barges are so pretty and colorful. So interesting that they are SO narrow. We walked through the city streets and to the church, but it was closed, but that was okay since I had been inside on our last visit with Margaret and Colin, so we walked through the graveyard and back to the car to drive to Hatton.

We stopped by the Hatton Locks, a series of 21 locks on the Grand Union Canal. They can raise the canal 144 feet in 2 ½ miles. It was opened in 1799 and improved the trade route, especially of coal, between London and the Midlands.

Above us on the banks of the canal was The Waterman Pub, an 18th century coaching inn, where we had a delicious dinner along with dessert again! We all shared a crème brulee and a chocolate croissant bread and butter pudding.

It was fun to catch up with our friends’ news and see their pictures from their latest trip to France where they saw some of the sties we are about to go see. So it was a great preview. They took us to the Hatton Station to catch our train back to London and waited with us on the platform til our train arrived. Seeing them was great and we will miss them until our next adventure together.

We reversed our walking through the stations and back to our hotel, getting back to our room a little after midnight.

Pictures from top: one of the beautiful buildings in Chipping Camden; Chipping Camden Market Hall; inside Badger Hall—see that Lemon Drizzle Cake just sitting there, tempting me in the lower left corner?; Badger Hall Tea Room; Main Street in Chipping Camden.