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EVERYONE LOVES A GOOD MURDER. In the past Londoners used to crowd around the gallows to watch a gruesome execution and today people will pay good money to sit in a darkened room with a bucket of popcorn enjoying the latest graphically violent thriller. Traditional, old-fashioned sleuthing and inspired guesswork may have been usurped by increasingly sophisticated forensics, but there is nothing new about our fascination with killers - in the past racehorses, greyhounds and even a ship have been named after them - nor any sign that this is diminishing.
Of course murders happen all the time, but only a minority have that special attribute needed to command our attention and when that happens the public can't get enough of it. A German visitor to Victorian London was told by a woman he met, 'You wish to know where the people's merry-makings are held? Go to Newgate on a hanging day - There you will find shouting, and joking, and junketting, from early dawn until the hangman has made his appearance and performed his office.' On such occasions stands would be erected for gawpers, taverns would charge a premium for their beer and brandy, and spectators of both sexes, every age and all classes would throng the streets in the hope of witnessing an actual execution.
Today we like to think we are more civilised than this, yet the attraction - 'enjoyment' really might not be too strong a word for it – has never gone away. Because of this the names of Crippen, Christie, Ellis, and Nilson – and of course Jack the Ripper - are woven into the fabric of London's cultural history alongside those of Whittington, Dickens and Wren. While most visitors to the capital still seek out the likes of St Paul's, the Tower and the London Eye, many others will pore over books and maps trying to locate such infamous landmarks as 10 Rillington Place, 39 Hilldrop Crescent or Whitechapel's notorious Blind Beggar pub. This book is for them, the ones who want to see for themselves a darker side of this great city, and to explore some of the more macabre episodes in its long and blood-soaked history.