JtR team on a Ripper tour

The project team visited London in late September to do some research at the Wellcome trust library and to take one of the many commercial Jack the Ripper walking tours around Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Here are some images of the tour and of some of the images circulated as part of the tour 'experience'. This was very helpful for the team in exploring key locations and visual/mood aspects for the design process. It was also for us about the tour 'experience design', getting a sense of the appeal and enduring popularity of the mystery as part of a tourist engagement with London, and the overlaps and schisms between the time being evoked and the present day locality. Brick lane is now a lively neighbourhood of Bangladeshi restaurants and design outlets. Some heritage listed buildings go for more than £2 pounds, and the site of Mary Kelly's murder is part of a large zone fenced off for major commercial redevelopment. At one stage during our tour the tour guide parked us in an alleyway off Brick lane and spoke about the condiitons endured by many of the impoverished inhabitants in the 1880s. She stood right next to a homeless man whose base for the night we were temporarily inhabiting in our historical journey back to earlier hard times. The homeless man seemed so inured to the interruptions of what must be at least 5 or 6 different tours operating each evening that he paid virtually no attention to us or the tour guide.