Murder to merchandise: The grim reality behind London's Jack the Ripper tourism

Indian Express

24-06-2025

By nightfall, the lanes of Whitechapel in London's East End become a stage – guides leading tourists, telling stories of a man in the 19th century who murdered women and vanished without a trace. This is Jack the Ripper's neighbourhood – or at least, according to the version of history the tourism industry has cut out and commodified into nightly entertainment.
For many visitors, a Ripper walk falls in their bucket list alongside Buckingham Palace and the London Eye. But what lies beneath the shadow of 'dark tourism' is the growing discomfort and a backlash over turning unsolved murders into a mass spectacle.
At the heart of the controversy is a brutal reality: while Jack the Ripper has become folklore, the suffering of the women he murdered has been diluted and repackaged for commercial gain. Mystery is being looked at through the lens of marketability, while the gruesome nature of his crimes being dismissed as footnotes.
Businesses in the area today shamelessly borrow the moniker like a brand: Jack the Clipper for a barbershop, Jack the Chipper for a local takeaway, and Jack's Place for a luxury retailer. Even a potato vendor, once named Jacket the Ripper, briefly cashed in on the infamy.
The murderer's persona has been mythologised and romanticised during the tours, and in some of them, images of the victims' mutilated bodies are projected onto walls, with laughter following stories of disembowelments. Modern residents of the neighbourhood are left to carry the weight of a joke they never asked to be part of. In 2020, Britain's official mapping body, the Ordnance Survey, removed from its library of maps a walking tour of the capital titled 'Guts and Garters in the Ripper's East End'.
The most visible public backlash came in 2015 with the opening of the Jack the Ripper Museum.
The museum had originally applied for planning permission under the guise of honouring the 'history of women in London's East End.' What opened, however, was an exhibition with Ripper-themed souvenirs being sold: teddy bears dressed as the Ripper and T-shirts with the killer's silhouette.
The betrayal stirred up a wave of protest. The museum's founder, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, said that the museum's full title is Jack the Ripper and the History of Women in East London, that the sign was incomplete, and maintained that 'We are not glorifying the murders or celebrating the murders; we are doing a forensic examination of the murders and setting that in the historical context of the period.'
The flashpoint led to the founding of the East End Women's Museum — a space explicitly meant to tell the stories that the Ripper industry ignored.
Charlotte Everitt, a guide with Rebel Tours, launched 'Jack the Ripper: What About the Women?' in an attempt to shift the focus back to murdered women. However, even well-meaning efforts like these face a paradox – remove the Ripper from the title, and interest plummets.
'We're a small-group company and we like that,' Everitt told CNN, 'but it's telling how many people still choose the other kind of guide.' Hence, even tours that try to center the victims often end up feeding into the same ecosystem.
Supporters of the Ripper walk often argue that they serve an educational purpose, but as former guides noted that true education requires context and a formal setting, not cheap thrills. One told CNN that she saw guides chase tourists with butcher knives or blast the 'Psycho' theme at murder sites. Some have insisted that all of the victims were sex workers despite concrete evidence to the contrary.
'The issue isn't discussing the Whitechapel murders,' Everitt told CNN. 'The issue is how they're discussed.'
The turning point for one guide came when a sex worker publicly confronted her mid-tour, accusing her of profiting from pain. The encounter was a mirror held up to her conscience — and she quit soon after. She told CNN: 'some [guides] do try to talk about the women… But, on those tours, in almost every case, the women are the butt of the joke.'
On the other hand, blogs like Spitalfields Life have refused to cover the Ripper murders altogether, focusing instead on the East End's working-class heritage and immigrant histories. Yet, as the blog's author notes, Ripper tourism continues to dominate the area.
London's East End is not alone; Jonestown in Guyana has become a hub for curious travelers, and in Milwaukee, visitors of the 'Cream City Cannibal Tour' are taken to sites linked to Jeffrey Dahmer, also the subject of a Netflix biographical crime drama. All these examples suggest a broader cultural trend – a fascination with killers and a corresponding erasure of their victims. Even people behind acts of misogynistic violence have been subsumed into popular culture.