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London Research Trip, May 2012

28 May

Christ Church, Spitalfields.

So anyway, I went on the most amazing research trip to London last Friday. The plan was pretty simple – stay in the heart of my beloved Spitalfields and take photographs and notes to help me while writing The Ripper Novel which is a time slip book incorporating both 1888 and 2012 Whitechapel. This wasn’t a hardship at all as my family come from Whitechapel and I’ve been kicking about the place off and on for longer than I can remember, although when my grandparents moved us back from Scotland they opted to live in Essex rather than go back to the East End, alas. I still regard it as my cultural, spiritual and ancestral home though so it’s always nice to go back.

I arrived at lunchtime on the Friday, ditched my stuff at my hotel on Osborn Street, which is at the end of Brick Lane and a bustling thoroughfare lined with Turkish and Indian cafes and shops and then headed out for a wander around in the simmering heat. I took photographs of interesting graffiti and visited Ripper Site Number Two – busy and faintly insalubrious Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman’s body was found in the backyard of number 29.

Hanbury Street.

After this I had a trip to All Saints where I tried on a profusion of dresses, all of which were too big and too long for me and then went to have lunch in Spitalfields Market before strolling down Brushfield Street and then along to Middlesex Street and Goulston Street, where the infamous ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing‘ graffiti and a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron were discovered in a doorway.

I then walked on to Mitre Square, which was Ripper Site Number Four via Ripper Site Number Five, which is that pokey service road at the side of White’s Row car park which marks the former site of the notorious and long vanished Dorset Street. Miller’s Court, where Mary Jane Kelly’s body was discovered was on the left of the street but it’s all been pulled down now.

Mitre Passage.

I couldn’t quite remember where Mitre Square was at first as I usually go at dusk and all the sunlight was a bit discombobulating but then turned a corner and there was Mitre Passage in front of me looking as dark and eerie as always. I felt a distinct chill in the air as I walked down Mitre Passage and it even seemed a bit like all sound was muted as well. Due to the movements of the police that fateful night in 1888, we can be fairly sure that the Ripper made his escape down Mitre Passage after murdering Catherine Eddowes…

I lurked in Mitre Square for a while waiting for this tour group to go away. They’re clustered in the spot where Catherine Eddowes’ body was found. As a Ripperologist, I am in no position to complain about the interest other people may have in Jack the Ripper but I’m a bit bemused by daylight Ripper tours. It’s much better to go at night! Another group came in after this one and I was a bit perturbed to hear the guide coming out with all sorts of antiquated nonsense about the case. He was also in the habit of emitting hideous shrill eldritch screams. In broad day light! What must the people in the surrounding offices think?! One day, however, I will do a tour and IT WILL BE AWESOME.

Poor old Catherine Eddowes was found on approximately this spot.

The entrance to Mitre Passage from Mitre Square. The Ripper probably made his escape this way. Or did he?

I went back to Spitalfields after this, pausing at the Hummingbird Bakery for a restorative slice of vanilla cake before wandering through the market and then back along Brick Lane. I carried on along Old Montague Street until I reached Durward Street, which is Ripper Site Number One. Back in 1888, Durward Street was known as Bucks Row and it was here on the 31st of August 1888 that Polly Nichols’ body was discovered on the pavement by the old board school, which is the tall building in the photograph.

Entrance to Durward Street aka Bucks Row.

The old board school building, which was there in 1888 and loomed over the site where poor Polly’s body was found.

After this, I went back to my hotel to get ready for the evening and felt really at home and happy as I listened to the call to prayer floating over Spitalfields while putting on my makeup. I’d arranged to meet some friends in the Princess Alice on Commercial Street and had an ace evening drinking gin and being remarkably silly. There was a LOT of gossip involving misuse of disliked names, tiaras, inappropriate wearing of bridesmaids dresses and MORE about dreadful people and I even had a proposal of marriage! However, we have a rule that What Happens At Gin And Whores Stays At Gin And Whores so my lips are sealed. After the pub I went up Brick Lane for a curry with my friends Del and Miranda, which was great fun. People always tut a bit at me when I say that I never feel at all unsafe in Whitechapel but it’s true – I walked back to my hotel alone at 2am without any qualms at all.

The next morning I packed up my stuff and then went for a walk across Whitechapel High Street to Henriques Street, which is Ripper Site Number Three. Back in 1888, Henriques Street was known as Berner Street and it was here that Elizabeth Stride’s body was discovered on the night of the 30th September – the first of what is known as The Double Event Murders. To be honest I’m not even sure that she was one of the Ripper’s victims but that’s no reason to forget all about her as I believe all these women should be remembered. I just wish they’d got as much concern and attention in life as they did after death.

Approximate spot of the entrance to the yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found.

Henriques Street is a miserable little road but when you recall how bustling and busy Whitechapel High Street was back in the late Victorian era, you start to get a real appreciation for how flagrant the Ripper was. This is also true of Hanbury Street and Dorset Street – both were busy and well populated. Bucks Row and Mitre Square, however, were altogether lonelier.

After leaving Henriques Street I walked towards the City, unintentionally going past Mitre Square as I went. It’s not actually that great a distance but certainly not ‘a few streets away’. However, my feet automatically took me that way as I headed to the City so if Elizabeth Stride was also murdered by the Ripper, I couldn’t dispute that his route may also have taken him past Mitre Square.

It was a real eye opener to visit all of the Ripper sites again as it gives a real feel for the areas and also the distance between them. In popular imagining, the murders all took place within a very small area but actually they were fairly widely apart. It’s possible to walk between all five with ease but they aren’t a few streets away from each other either.

After all this, I walked through the deserted City (hardly anyone lives there so virtually everything closes down at the weekend) past the Gherkin and those lovely old City churches that stand serenely in the midst of glinting blue glass office buildings and relentless modernity and on to Austin Friars.

Not the greatest outfit for a sweltering summer’s day in the City: All Saints dress and Doc Marten boots!

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a HUGE FAN of Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel and so I couldn’t resist a trip to see the site of Austin Friars, which was the main residence of Thomas Cromwell. Nothing now remains of the huge mansion complete with gardens and tennis courts that he built there for himself and his sprawling household but I think you can still get some sense of it. Austin Friars is a small quiet gated street tucked away in the streets in between London Wall and Old Broad Street. You have to concentrate very hard to imagine even the faintest essence of Thomas Cromwell in the air but what it does underline is the fact that he was very much a City Man with a residence that even in the sixteenth century was at the very heart of the old City and at the centre of the London financial world with its guilds, aldermen and banking houses.

I was extremely moved to stand on the site of Thomas Cromwell’s home, which is now the Drapers’ Hall at the end of Throgmorton Street and even wept a little tear for him. Or at least for the Cromwell that Mantel conjured up, whom I am madly in love with. In the pub the night before, I joked about falling through my own time slip and ending up in Tudor England where I would show Thomas Cromwell my iPhone and recommend that he tries Cut The Rope. Sadly, however, the sun shone and a slight breeze rose making the trees in the small gated garden rustle their green skirts enticingly but there were no sightings of long dead men.

I carried on through the city, past the Crutched Friars (Thomas Wyatt was given the Crutched Friars church after the Dissolution and apparently pulled it down to build a tennis court) and on to the London Wall where I ate a peaceful lunch in a pretty garden on one of the high walks leading to the Museum of London. My first London job after leaving university was in Moorgate and I always smile to myself a bit when I walk past what was my office, remembering the callow goth that I once was. Oh dear.

The London Wall is dotted with ruins from a long gone age.

I paid a quick visit to the Museum of London, conscious that I had a bus and train to catch back home to Bristol and wanted to have a last drink in the sunshine at Spitalfields Market before I went. I bought presents, including fab tea towels with eighteenth century ladies on them and books about the Great Fire for the Seven Year Old. In the museum itself I was particularly taken with this dress, which was worn by a little girl in honour of the Queen’s coronation in 1953. How lovely! I’m surprised no one has produced replicas.

SUCH a pretty dress!

Anyway, that was the end of my research visit. I’ll be back again once the Olympics have gone away as I glimpsed quite a few old pubs and winding alleyways that are just crying out for exploration. There was a wedding at Christ Church, Spitalfields on Saturday morning and the sound of bells really gladdened my heart as I made my way home.

The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now – Robert Clack & Philip Hutchinson

22 Apr

As pretty much anyone who reads this blog on even an irregular basis will already know, I’ve been a committed and occasionally committable Ripperologist for well over twenty years now and recently made the eerie discovery that great x 3 grandfather was in H Division in 1888 and most likely living in the Whitechapel police station on Commercial Street at the time of the murders.

I say eerie but actually it’s not that much of a coincidence really – my interest in Jack the Ripper is down to my grandmother, who raised me. She came from the east end of London and was a scion of one of those sprawling Cockney clans with their gangsters, strange vaudeville songs of interminable pointlessness, rhyming slang, music hall relatives, affection for EELS, insane ADORATION of West Ham football club (when my great grandmother died, the club sent a, hopefully appropriately coloured, wreath to her funeral – do they do that for everyone, I wonder?) and horror stories about the Blitz. As a result, despite being born in Scotland and very far from the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, I’ve pretty much always considered myself to be culturally a Cockney because that’s what I grew up with. When we moved from Scotland to Essex, it felt like we were almost home. Almost but not quite…

I’m only partially joking when I tell people that the Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh is my ideal man.

Oh no, wait, EELS!

Elements of the past and the future combining to make something not quite as good as either…

I should make that my motto.

I will now use this unusually insightful Mighty Boosh quote to clumsily lead on to the main CRUX of this already tiresomely rambling post, while simultaneously saving face by pretending that this is some sort of post modern meta conceit. Or something.

Due to all of the above, I couldn’t resist reading a book about Jack the Ripper’s London – especially as I am currently supposed to be writing a novel set in that time of dank misery and pea souper fogs but don’t get me started on that or I’ll get all angsty and you wouldn’t like that. Being the innovator that I clearly am, I decided to give it a whirl on my Kindle despite it having illustrations, which is something I have hitherto failed to encounter in a Kindle book.

The Ten Bells pub on the corner of Hanbury Street. To be honest, the Ten Bells has undergone quite a transformation in the many years since I first saw it.

To my surprise, the pictures were still clear and easy to look at although I suspect they are somewhat smaller than the printed versions and also in black in white whereas I think some of the printed ones may be in colour?

Whitechapel today – elements of the past and future that actually, to my eyes, look pretty good together. I’m irreverent and love the element of surprise though.

Anyway, mechanics aside, this is a great little book and one that anyone interested in the Ripper murders would find pretty fascinating not least because it doesn’t just cover the so called Canonical Five but also features several other murders that have on occasion been ascribed to the Ripper including Emma Smith, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles and the Pinchin Street Torso.

Hawksmoor’s Christ Church looming over Commercial Street.

While there is a very basic explanation of the crimes and a brief biography of each victim, the real emphasis is on the area itself with fascinating photographs of the crime scenes and places (some rather obscure) associated with the murders as they were in Victorian times and how they appear now.

I was completely enthralled by this but moved too as just as the Ripper murders themselves open an unusually vivid and detailed window into the lives of abandoned women in Victorian times, comparing photographs of the east end as it was in 1888 and how it is now is an eye opening experience when you realise that whole streets have been swept away like so much detritus not just in the aftermath of the Blitz but as the result of urban planning. Saddest of all, I suppose is the demise of Dorset Street, dubbed the ‘Worst Street in London’ and considered so terrible a locale that it was demolished and replaced by well, nothing much at all.

View from the top of White’s Row car park looking down at what used to be Dorset Street and the approximate spot of the entrance to Miller’s Court. Mere moments before taking this photograph I accidentally smacked my car door on a concrete post while opening it and enraged my husband so much that there was almost another murder on that site…

Maybe I’m just annoyed because all of the development in Spitalfields makes it more difficult for me to imagine what it must have been like in 1888 when my ancestor was on his beat or the 1930s when my great grandfather worked at Truman’s on Brick Lane. It’s not all bad though as it is still possible to catch the odd glimpse of the old Whitechapel – just take a stroll down Artillery Lane, Hanbury Street or Gunthorpe Street at night.

Artillery Lane.

In summary therefore, I’d recommend this book not just to those who want to know more about the Ripper murders but also anyone interested in the changing face of London.

Check it out:

The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now — a bargain at £2.87 if you have a Kindle.

The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd — a SUPERB book if you’re interested in the social history of London’s east end and now available for Kindle for £5.93.

Soulless – Gail Carriger

11 Mar

I’ll be honest – I may be a card carrying (okay, the card is imaginary) long time goth, Victorian Prostitute re-enactor and Ripperologist but I’ve always been a bit wary of the whole steampunk thing. I think it’s the excessive amounts of BEIGE that I find a bit offputting – or perhaps it’s the way that steampunkers (is that right?) seem to take themselves so seriously.

‘Steampunk is what happened when goths discovered khaki‘ – someone on Live Journal, circa 2007.

Therefore, the idea of reading a steampunk novel wasn’t really all that appealing as I assumed it would be full of goggles, more BEIGE than anyone under the age of sixty should ever be asked to cope with and a lot of frippery about waxed moustachios and God only knows what else.

Well, I was WRONG as I just finished reading a steampunk book and I BLOODY LOVED IT.

I’d been vaguely drawn to Soulless by Gail Carriger anyway because I really liked the cover and also have a very soft spot for anachronistic bad ass wayward Victorian girls. I’m rather less keen on the paranormal (yes, I know, just what sort of a goth am I?!) but I thought I could handle it in small doses so long as it didn’t get all Twilight.

I can assure you that this is NOTHING like Twilight although there’s plenty of the paranormal here.

Soulless opens in dramatic fashion with the heroine, Alexia getting fed up about the lack of food laid on at a fashionable London ball and taking off to the library, where she commits the etiquette FAIL of ordering tea and cakes for herself only to be assailed by a lisping vampire in an embarrassingly outmoded shirt. This would all be AWKWARD enough, only the vampire doesn’t appear to realise that la belle Alexia has no soul, which in this re-imagined and re-ordered Victorian England means that she has the ability to neutralise supernatural powers and render their holders momentarily mortal…

What ensues is a wonderfully amusing romp through Alexia’s London, a world of dirigibles, batshit hats, science, lofty vampires, cake and oddly attractive werewolves. I really loved this completely mad imaginary upside down world where supernaturals and humans live alongside each other; Queen Victoria likes to pay chatty visits to subjects and handsome young fops are capable of creating the latest Parisian hair styles with just a few twists of wire.

I loved it so much that I was sad to leave so it’s pretty lucky that there’s four more books in the series for me to enjoy really! I may even have to buy the graphic novel version as well.

I definitely recommend this one. Okay, I’m not QUITE ready to festoon myself with beige, artfully broken fob watches and goggles but I definitely dig the soulless Alexia Tarabotti.

Soulless: The Parasol Protectorate: Book 1

Feminism and Jack the Ripper – a ramble through a disordered mind

31 Jan

I got yet another email last night accusing me of being ‘un-feminist’ because of my interest in Jack the Ripper and suggesting that I am contributing to the glamourising of what were clearly horrific crimes against women and subsequent fetishising of the victims. I say ‘yet another email’ as this isn’t actually the first time I have been accused of something along these lines and probably won’t be the last so I thought I’d publicly address it here or at least thrash it out in the open where you can all bear witness to my torturous thought processes and lack of any intellectual rigour.

I feel like I shouldn’t have to say ‘I’m a feminist’ because I don’t happen to think that’s how these things should work. I mean, I don’t have a very clear idea about what feminism is but I do have definite ideas about what it ISN’T. Or maybe I don’t. It’s all so NEBULOUS, you see. And also PERSONAL. All I know is that I am one. I suppose I’d feel the same sort of uncertain inarticulate mental stultification if someone asked me ‘Why are you a woman?’ I DON’T KNOW WHY. I JUST AM.

For the record, I also believe that not every woman is a feminist and that not all feminists are women. Make of that what you will.

However, unlike seemingly a lot of other people, feminism itself holds no fears for me. As I may have mentioned before, I was raised by my grandparents, both of whom grew up during the second world war and had, shall we say, rather NOVEL ideas about child rearing and, more crucially, femininity or rather the role of women. my grandmother was very fond of lecturing me about my ‘duty’ to any future husband (if I was lucky enough to ensnare one with my frankly limited charms because don’t forget I was ALSO getting regular bulletins about how unloveable I am too) and how I had to be at the beck and call of this draconian imaginary complacent entitled fuckwit and have his sodding dinner on the table when he got home from his bloody work and all sorts of nonsense like that.

However, luckily for me, my mother, whom I did see from time to time (although in a charmingly Catherine Cookson twist, I was raised to think that she was my sister – which gives me excellent fodder for my books as you can imagine) was what I consider to be Old School Feminist which served as an excellent antidote.

I love the way that whenever I feel stressed and unhappy, it is my grandmother’s voice I hear inside my head (not literally – I’m not certifiable), ordering me to clean and be obedient and subservient but when I’m feeling pretty good, it is my mother who inspires me. She’s pretty awesome and a great role model actually but I’ll talk about that some other time.

Now, before I go on, I did once upon a time announce that I wasn’t a feminist but in my defence it was said to someone who is not only as thick as mince but also well known for being a pompous buffoon fond of dreary, badly spelt self righteous pontificating and dismal condescending twaddle. They were spoiling for a fight and I was in a sufficiently bad mood to oblige. I felt bad though. I felt even worse when one of my very dearest friends jumped in to defend me against the inevitable attack. I am a bad person.

I’m not going to do that now though. Well, clearly I’m not.

The question about Ripperology and feminism does interest me though because it is something that makes me feel vaguely uneasy at times. I know that feminist groups have protested in the past about the Ripper exhibit at the London Dungeons and moved to have the name of the Ten Bells changed back again when it was briefly called the Jack the Ripper and that makes me wonder – am I the Enemy here? Am I the one using these horrible murders for entertainment and a bit of seedy gratuitous thrill seeking? Should someone be trying to stop ME?

I mean, I am not an academic and have no useful, official or sensible purpose to my interest in the Ripper case so does that mean I am being titillated by it in some way? Is this one of those situations where if you don’t have a good reason for being there, then you shouldn’t be there at all? I don’t think so – but then, for a start, I don’t see it as a game of whodunnit. As I have explained here before, I am not actually all that interested in unmasking the Ripper. Beyond a belief that he was a random nutcase and not the product of some macabre, internecine, Hollywood friendly conspiracy, I have very little interest in him at all. But even if I DID, would that mean that I am fundamentally some sort of raving misogynist? I don’t think so.

What I am actually interested in are his victims and their lives as they offer a snapshot into existences that ordinarily would be hidden from view in their own time and then lost to history. What happened to them was dreadful beyond all comprehension and I suppose I see it as my own personal mission not to forget them and to make sure other people don’t either. I also have a more underhand agenda of using their unhappy stories of relationship breakdown, dependancy, poverty and addiction to remind people of why we NEED welfare in this country. I’m always saying that I judge societies by the way they treat their weakest members and I’m afraid, based on the lives of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman et al, I’m judging YOU, Victorian England, VERY HARSHLY INDEED.

Do I fetishise them? Well, I’d like to think that I don’t. The definition of fetishising is to hold an intense, excessive and irrational devotion to something. I don’t think that’s the case here. However, yes, I do refer to myself as a Victorian Prostitute Re-enactor and, yes, I am writing a book about the Ripper murders. The re-enactment is a sort of in-joke based on my previous experiences of re-enactment in my less creaky youth and also because one of my friends and I thought it would be fun to dress up in Victorian rags and hang around Whitechapel at night. I suppose there’s an element of reclaiming the streets there and also a nod to the fact that most re-enactment appears to involve men with long hair recreating past wars, bloodshed and hideous conflict so why shouldn’t we, as women, dress up to recall to mind our own bloody history or to show a bit of across the centuries solidarity with our unfortunate nineteenth century sisters?

I also like to dress in Victorian clothes and as I’m a bit scruffy, that’s always going to veer towards the more bohemian and down at heel styling, I’m afraid.

As to the book, well, it seems that what I like to write about are women, their relationships with each other and how they are affected by traumatic events. I’ll own up now that if you are expecting a big fat whodunnit and a dramatic unmasking at the end of my Ripper book, you’ll be sadly disappointed as the book isn’t really about him – it’s about the effect his actions have on the lives of a trio of fairly different young women and, in essence, explores more fully the ideas that I don’t really have the space or energy to expound in full in this here blog post.

In a nutshell then, I don’t believe that, done properly, Ripperology is intrinsically ‘un-feminist’ or women hating or misogynistic or using murder victims as some sort of bizarre historical snuff porn. Not all Ripperologists are the same though – some enjoy the thrill of the chase and get really, really excited about each and every new theory about the Ripper’s identity; others are in it because they like the whole ambience of gaslit, foggy streets (I’m pretty appreciative of this sort of thing) and others, like me, are interested in the social history and can barely bring themselves to look at the mortuary photographs of the victims. I’m ALL OVER maps and contemporary photographs of the actual area though.

I’m not being all holier than thou, though. Although I will tend to avoid most documentaries on the Ripper case, the deeply flawed From Hell is one of my all time favourite films. I don’t feel obliged to wholeheartedly LOVE everything about it though – the prettying up of what, and I say this as someone who has absolute respect for them, was a group of rather unlovely women makes me wince rather a lot and makes me wonder if it is more disrespectful to make someone more attractive than they were in reality than it is to show them in all their toothless, grimy, warts n all glory?

I think I’ve said enough. What do you think? Have you been grinding your teeth for months wondering if I am the sort of misguided female who writes love letters to serial killers on death row (I’m really REALLY not but as to whether there should even BE a death row, ah well, that’s a whole new rant really, isn’t it?) or if I have ANY IDEA how rampagingly misogynistic I am being by flouncing about the place rambling on about GIN and alleyways?

Anyway, I have other thoughts but my RSI wrist is telling me stop plus this is getting a bit epic now and is rapidly spiralling out of control. As always, I am reminded of the scene in Father Ted, where he accepts an award and gives the longest speech ever, being interrupted at the point where he says: ‘And now, moving on to LIARS…’ What do you think, anyway? Let’s have a chat about it. Or not. We could talk about something else if you like? Like the snow or what happened at the end of the last episode of Sherlock or how much the Daily Mail pay journalists to watch award ceremonies and premieres and look out for tan lines/price stickers on the bottom of shoes/bags under the eyes/spinach between the teeth…

The Pleasures of Men – Kate Williams

22 Jan

‘Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination.

But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead, and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.

But the murders continue to panic the city and Catherine gradually realizes she is snared in a deadly trap, where nothing is as it first appears.
And lurking behind the lies Catherine has been told are secrets more deadly and devastating than anything her imagination can conjure …‘

The Victorians were really keen on microcosm paintings, panoramic views of their society crammed full of faces, stories and activity like so many over dressed ants all busying themselves at the same time. William Powell Frith’s amazing sprawling The Derby Day and The Railway Station are perfect examples of this particularly Victorian genre, where the viewer is invited to greedily observe everything, their eyes scanning the myriad of different faces, pausing here and there to ponder what their story is.

In recent years, the ‘Victoriana’ novel has gained popularity and almost become a genre in its own right. Like the microcosm paintings of Frith, there are rules to this genre, certain period set pieces that must be included, descriptions and observations of a more contemporary nature that must be made and they are invariably populated by a vast cast of characters, mostly incidental but who must be described in great and lurid detail.

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams is one such book. I was very much looking forward to reading it, anticipating something akin to Michel Faber’s brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. Now, The Pleasures of Men is very similar to The Crimson Petal but only in so far as most other ‘Victoriana’ novels are – there’s the usual description of dirt, decay and damp. The wails of unfortunate babies follow the characters wherever they venture. People drink gin like it’s about to run out. There’s an awful lot of prostitutes.

There are other similarities – like Faber’s Sugar, Catherine, the heroine of The Pleasures of Men is damaged by her past and keen on feverishly writing down fantasies that involve violence, death, murder and destruction. Fascinated by a serial killer, known as The Man of Crows, she writes lurid accounts of his murders and eventually decides to venture out into the city at night to walk in his footsteps, believing herself ‘protected’ by the evil that she has always been told dwells inside her.

This was a complex and often deeply unpleasant book. I’ve seen complaints that it is over written and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment but I believe that it is intentionally so. The writing is full blown, lavish, feverish and often over wrought, creating a really horrible, almost suffocatingly intense atmosphere of heat, dust and dirt as observed by a sexually obsessed, disturbed Victorian teenager who has spent time in a lunatic asylum.

The narrowness of a young Victorian girl’s life is well described here – not just that of Catherine with her peculiar circumstances but those of her over dressed acquaintances, who sexually torment their maids and fantasise about serial killers while slyly keeping watch for suitable young men.

At times though, the plot, which when you think about it isn’t really all that complicated (you’ll be disappointed when you discover the identity of the Man of Crows) veers not so much into confusion as into vague slapdashness, almost as if the writer herself lost interest about a hundred pages before the end (which was a bit of a damp squib all things considered) and decided that she didn’t care who the Man of Crows was or who he murdered any more. I can’t blame her for that – I didn’t really care either.

Would I recommend this book? Well, yes and no. If you are in the mood for a dip into the revolting iniquity of London’s east end in the 1840s and have a thing for Victorian asylums and the deranged meanderings of cooped up young girls as well as splendid Victorian set pieces like visits to pie shops, trips to gin dens and a splendidly disastrous visit to the vaudeville theatre then you’ll almost certainly love this. Otherwise you’ll probably start to feel a bit queasy and long for something a bit less histrionic.

Personally, although I did, I think, rather enjoy myself while reading it (and also feel slightly alarmed as I have written about similar themes in my own Victorian effort), I went off and had a long bath when I’d finished reading and splashed the water about a bit while muttering ‘A MILLION POUND ADVANCE? A. MILLION. POUNDS?’ over and over again until I felt like booking myself in for a nice restorative stay at Catherine’s lunatic asylum, the lovely sounding Lavenderfields.

Having said that, I fully expect this to be made into a film at some point in the near future…

Ps. Where is the woman’s right hand in the cover photograph? Haha, now that I have made you look, you will never be able to UNSEE.

A quick visit to the Ten Bells, Spitalfields

12 Jan

The Ten Bells is right next to Christ Church in Spitalfields and directly opposite the entrance to the now trendy and bustling Spitalfields Market. There has been a pub on the corner of Fornier Street and Commercial Street since 1752, but the Ten Bells as we know it now has only been in existence since Victorian times, when it served the locals of Spitalfields and the porters and clientele of the market over the road.

The pub has an unsavoury reputation thanks to its connections to the Jack the Ripper case as two of the victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly are known to have drunk there, although obviously it is not known if Jack the Ripper himself was a customer.

The Ten Bells was briefly known as The Jack the Ripper between 1976 and 1988, but the brewery eventually forced into changing the name back to the original again after women’s groups, quite rightly, argued that a notorious murderer of women should not be commemorated by having pubs named after him.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the Ten Bells over the years. I still remember the very first time I went there: it was 2002 and I was going out with someone who lived in Wapping. It didn’t take me long to persuade him to walk with me up to Whitechapel at night so that I could poke around the murder sites and see Spitalfields for myself. He spent the entire evening worrying about being mugged or worse, but I was in love with the area from the first moment that I set foot in it. I knew that I would feel at home anyway, of course as my family came from there and I had always felt a deep link to the East End of London but I wasn’t prepared for quite how much I would love it.

I like to imagine my ancestors drinking there and the Truman’s sign never fails to make me smile as my great grandfather was a manager at their Brick Lane brewery in the last century. While HIS grandfather was a H Division police sergeant living in the Whitechapel police station during the Ripper investigation in 1888.

The first time we went to the Ten Bells, by now a thriving, dimly lit and hipster cool bar filled with a curious mix of cool young things and awkward looking tourists in anoraks, I found it unbearable though – the music, chatter and laughter were all too loud and I found myself needing to leave almost immediately, disappointed that it wasn’t at all how I expected it to be. To make matters worse, while we were standing by the door, I became convinced that I could feel someone put their hands on my waist, only to look around and realise that there was no one standing anywhere near me. Spooky!

And then to make matters even worse, my boyfriend then went a bit mad when we got back to his flat and claimed that voices in his head were telling him to hurt me. We didn’t last very long, as you can imagine. Actually, that’s not true as actually I almost ended up married to him, until merciful, blessed fate intervened.

After this, I made occasional forays into the Ten Bells but was always quickly forced out by the noise and hubbub and, I don’t know, a feeling of pervasive, intense gloom. I persevere though and on the last visit miraculously got a table at which to drink our gin. Even more miraculously, it was beside the window so we had an amazing view up and out at Christ Church looming over us. My companion told me that I looked somewhat wonderful with the flickering candlelight and gloomy looks up at the ominous white church, but I expect I just looked slightly crazed. It has that effect, you see. Or maybe it’s just the GIN.

I’ve noticed that the new owner has given it a face lift, which is probably much needed but I do miss the essential seediness. There’s a cool pop up restaurant in the top floor function room at the moment, the outside is freshly painted and, crikey, is that an awning as well? I have my own plans involving the Ten Bells, but I don’t want to jinx them by talking about them here…

The Ten Bells, 84 Commercial Street, Whitechapel, E1 6LY. One of the finest and most iconic pubs in London.

Dickens’ London

29 Nov

Longterm readers of this blog will know that I am passionately interested in Victorian London, particularly its grimy, seedy underbelly so I was thrilled when Haus Publishing sent me a copy of Dickens’s London by Peter Clark to review.

‘Few novelists have written so intimately about a city in the way that Charles Dickens wrote about London. A near-photographic memory made his contact with the city indelible from a very young age and it remained his constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that, ‘we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,’ as he produces ‘characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.’

But the ‘character’ he was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, all aspects of the capital from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames; these were the constant cityscapes of his life and work.

Based on five walks in central London, Peter Clark illuminates the settings of Dickens’s London, his life, his journalism and his fiction. He also explores ‘The First Suburbs’ (Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse) as they feature in Dickens’s writing.‘

There’s several books available about Victorian London but this is one is unique as it actually guides you through the streets on five fascinating and in-depth walking tours, which lead you past buildings and places that appear in Dickens’ work (with relevant quotes) or were important to his life. I haven’t attempted one of the tours yet (but will do next time I am in London) but found this a fascinating armchair read as it really leaves no stone uncovered and also highlights just how intertwined Dickens and the city were.

This book is ideal for anyone interested in Victorian London – especially those who are keen on really long walks! I can’t wait to give one of the walks a go.

This brilliant book is a bargain at £7.99 from Haus Publishing’s site and readers who use the Exclusive To This Blog discount code of MMG25 will get 25% off! (It says it is coming out in February but is actually available to buy right now.)

Thanks so much to Haus for my review copy!

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