Flower and Dean Street was a road at the heart of the

Spitalfields Spitalfields () is an area in London, England and is located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is in East London and situated in the East End of London, East End. Spitalfields is formed around Commercial Street, London, Commercial Stre ...

rookery A rookery is a colony of breeding rooks, and more broadly a colony of several types of breeding animals, generally gregarious birds. Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds of colony-fo ...

in the East End of London. It was one of the most notorious slums of the

Victorian era In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed the ...

, being described in 1883 as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis", and was closely associated with the victims of

Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer who was active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also ...

. Land was acquired by the Fossan brothers in the mid 17th century. At that time it consisted of the southern part of Lolesworth Field, a

tenterground A tenterground, tenter ground or teneter-field was an area used for drying newly manufactured cloth after fulling. The wet cloth was hooked onto frames called " tenters" and stretched taut using " tenter hooks", so that the cloth would dry fl ...

to its south and a spinning and twisting ground with gardens to the south of that. The brothers built a street through the field which was named after them, which became Fashion Street. They split the tenterground into two long parcels and employed two bricklayers, John Flower and Gowan Dean, to build houses along its length. By the nineteenth century the back gardens of the original tenements had been built on 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" is a Victorian era term for a form of cheap accommodation in which the inhabitants (who are not members of one family) are all lodged together in the same room or rooms, whether for eating or sleeping. The slang terms ''doss ...

s in London. In 1871 there were 31 such places in the street. They provided accommodation for the desperate and the destitute and 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 (16 April 1821 – 6 October 1893) was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often William Hogarth, Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his mos ...

as the epitome of social degradation in his description of his painting ''

Work Work may refer to: * Work (human activity), intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the community ** Manual labour, physical work done by humans ** House work, housework, or homemaking ** Working animal, an ani ...

''. 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 Slum clearance, slum eviction or slum removal is an urban renewal strategy used to transform low-income settlements with poor reputation into another type of development or housing. This has long been a strategy for redeveloping urban communities; ...

began 1881–83. In 1888, the

Whitechapel murders The Whitechapel murders were committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel District (Metropolis), Whitechapel district in the East End of London between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891. At various points some or all of these eleven unso ...

by the serial killer known as

prompted further redevelopment. Two of those women murdered, Elizabeth Stride and

Catherine Eddowes Catherine Eddowes (14 April 1842 – 30 September 1888) was the fourth of the Jack the Ripper#Canonical five, canonical five victims of the notorious unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, who is believed to have killed and Mutila ...

, resided in two

s on the street. A study using geographical profiling suggested that the killer probably lived on the street. The scandal of the 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 the street where two of his victims lived.Jason Bennetto,
Has profiling discovered the real face of Jack the Ripper?
, ''The Independent'', Monday, 20 November 2006 The Flower and Dean Walk housing estate is directly across Commercial Street from the historic site of the street.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Flower And Dean Street Streets in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Jack the Ripper Spitalfields Slum clearance