Flower and Dean Street
Encyclopedia
Spitalfields
Spitalfields is a former parish in the borough of Tower Hamlets, in the East End of London, near to Liverpool Street station and Brick Lane. The area straddles Commercial Street and is home to many markets, including the historic Old Spitalfields Market, founded in the 17th century, Sunday...
rookery
Rookery (slum)
A rookery was the colloquial British English term given in the 18th and 19th centuries to a city slum occupied by poor people...
in the East End of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. It was one of the most notorious slum areas of the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
and was closely associated with the victims of Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper
"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the...
. It was described in 1883 as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis".
The street was built in the 1650s and rebuilt in parts in the eighteenth. The name evolved from that of two local bricklayers, John Gower and Gowen Deane, who were associated with its construction. By the nineteenth century the back gardens of the original tenements had been built over for narrow courts and alleys and the area had become a slum. The poverty and deprivation of the area was reflected by the greatest concentration of common lodging-house
Common lodging-house
A Common lodging-house is Victorian term for a form of cheap accommodation in which inhabitants are lodged together in one or more rooms in common with the rest of the inmates, who are not members of one family, whether for eating or sleeping. The slang term flophouse is roughly the equivalent of...
s in London. In 1871 there were thirty one such places in the street. These, as well as providing accommodation for the desperate and the destitute were a focus for the activities of local thieves and prostitutes. Already in 1865 the street was referred to by the artist Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...
as the epitome of social degradation in his description of his painting Work
Work (painting)
Work is a painting by Ford Madox Brown, which is generally considered to be his most important achievement. It attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy...
. Brown describes a vagabond depicted in the picture as living in Flower and Dean Street, "haunt of vice", "where the policemen walk two and two, and the worst cut-throats surround him".
Slum clearance began 1881-83. The sanguinary activities of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper
"Jack the Ripper" is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the...
in the area in 1888 prompted further redevelopment. Two of his prostitute victims, Elizabeth Stride
Elizabeth Stride
Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride is believed to be the third victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer called Jack the Ripper, who killed and mutilated prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London from late August to early November 1888.She was nicknamed "Long Liz"...
and Catherine Eddowes
Catherine Eddowes
Catherine Eddowes was one of the victims in the Whitechapel murders. She was the second person killed on the night of Sunday 30 September 1888, a night which already had seen the murder of Elizabeth Stride less than an hour earlier...
, resided in two common lodging houses on the street. The scandal of these killings prompted 'respectable' landlords to divest themselves of property here and all traces of the street were virtually eradicated between 1891 and 1894 in a major slum clearance programme. There is now a housing block where the street used to be.
A 2008 Scotland Yard geographical profile of Jack the Ripper concluded that he most probably lived in this very street where two of his victims lived.