Max Wooldridge: Ripping into London's bad-taste tour

Crime historian Donald Rumbelow gives the Jack the Ripper crime tour in the Whitechapel District, where the murders by Jack the Ripper took place. Photo / Getty Images

As a proud Londoner I've been on a fair number of themed tours of my home city; a rock 'n' roll bus tour, a tour of the Bank of England, and most recently, a Karl Marx walking tour: "Walkers of the world unite," I shouted just before the guide started, "You have nothing to lose but your heels".

I once even embarked on a very personal and utterly pointless pilgrimage of all the locations in the 1960s movie Blow-Up, culminating in a game of mime tennis in an obscure Southeast London park featured heavily in the film.

But there's one specialist London tour I've never been interested in joining, despite it being one of city's most popular — a Jack the Ripper tour.

I finally understood my reluctance recently when I was mistaken for a tourist and handed a flyer: Join the Jack the Ripper Walking Tour … If you dare!

"Guests will walk his death trail inspecting the murder sites," the leaflet promised. The tour includes the 10 Bells Pub, built in 1752, where many of the victims drank. There's even a "Ripperologist" on hand to decipher evidence and reveal the killer's identity.

Instead, the flyer got me thinking about the bigger picture, and back to the events of late-2006, when the town of Ipswich, in the English county of Suffolk, was rocked by a series of sex-worker murders. The killer, Steve Wright, was quickly apprehended and given a life sentence. He subsequently became known as The Suffolk Strangler. Like Jack the Ripper, he murdered five prostitutes.

Now, I thought, if I were to launch a Suffolk Strangler Tour — a walking tour that included all the murder sites, and the house where the killer lived — there would be outrage, and I could be understandably lynched.

But a murder tour, based on events that took place more than a century ago, is okay?

When it comes to our attitudes to murder, timing is everything. Apparently a certain time has to pass before we're allowed to revel respectfully in the details of gruesome murder cases and not be thought freakish.

By that time all relatives of the victims will have themselves passed on. Murdered prostitutes and sex workers — like all of us — have families and leave behind loved ones.
Ripper tours of London are acceptable only because enough time has passed to inure us to their violence. The years have erased their true horror.

As more time passes, these Whitechapel murders become distant enough as not to no longer seem real. The killer has almost become a mythical figure, the horror of whose crimes has diminished. The violence has been sanitised until only the mystery is left.

Whether it's a tour of murder sites old or new — even if they are more than a century old and cloaked in Victorian intrigue — I've no wish to pay money to hear the gory details of women being stalked, bludgeoned and mutilated.

Sure, I'd be interested in the bits of a London Ripper tour that focused on how the landscape of East London has changed, seeing old workhouses converted into luxury flats. To gain some understanding of the gentrification of my hometown. But I don't fancy hearing a grown man regale gruesome discoveries in dark lanes: "how Jack sprang out of the fog to butcher his five victims along dimly lit alleys".

I'm not even all that squeamish. It's just that I find a bit tasteless any tour that focuses on the handiwork of a serial killer.

And I sure don't want anything putting me off my double shot latte. Not the price they are nowadays.