Museum billed as celebration of London women opens as Jack the Ripper exhibit

Related Link  Jack the Ripper, 'interesting history', and masculine violence

A new museum originally billed as a celebration of east London women and the suffragettes has been branded a “sick joke” by local residents after it opened as a venue dedicated to the crimes of Jack the Ripper.

In the planning application for the site, a few hundred metres from the Tower of London, residents were promised “the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history”. It was approved by Tower Hamlets council earlier this year.

But it was only when the covers came down last week that residents found the museum’s subject matter had changed so dramatically. The Ripper was the name given to the man behind a series of barbarous and unsolved murders of sex workers in London’s East End between 1888 and 1891. He has never been definitively identified.