The Ten Bells: When a Pub Sells Its Own Murders

The Ten Bells stands on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street in Spitalfields, directly across from Christ Church. The current building dates from the 1850s. There has been a pub on this exact spot since at least 1755 and possibly earlier. The interior tilework, blue and white floral panels climbing the walls behind the bar, was installed in the 1880s and has survived essentially unchanged since. It is the most documented Victorian pub interior in East London.

The reason almost everyone knows the building, however, is the autumn of 1888.

The Ripper autumn

Between 31 August and 9 November 1888, five women were murdered in Whitechapel and Spitalfields in attacks attributed to a single unidentified killer the press would call Jack the Ripper. The five canonical victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. The murders happened within roughly a square mile, mostly between 1 and 4 in the morning, mostly in narrow streets within ten minutes' walk of where the Ten Bells stands. The killer was never caught, never identified, and remains one of the most studied unsolved cases in criminal history.

The Ten Bells appears in the documentary record of two of the victims. Annie Chapman, the second canonical victim, was seen drinking in pubs along Commercial Street on the morning of 8 September 1888, the morning she was killed. The Ten Bells, sitting on Commercial Street, is widely identified as one of the pubs she visited, though the contemporary newspaper accounts do not name it unambiguously. The clearer connection is to Mary Jane Kelly, the fifth and final canonical victim. Kelly was seen drinking in the Ten Bells on the evening of 8 November 1888 by a woman named Elizabeth Foster. She left at some point in the night. She was murdered in Miller's Court, around the corner, in the early hours of 9 November.

What this means is that the Ten Bells has a verifiable place in the chronology of the Ripper murders. The pub was there. The victims were there. The interior the victims saw, the Victorian tilework, is the interior on the walls today.

The 1976 decision

For eighty-eight years after the murders, the Ten Bells was a working East End pub like any other, attached to the brewery system that owned most London pubs. The Ripper connection was known but not advertised. East End locals drank there. So did the labourers from Spitalfields Market and, eventually, the artists who began moving into the cheap former silk-weaver houses on Fournier Street and Princelet Street in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1976 the pub's owners renamed it The Jack the Ripper. They redecorated the interior with crime-scene photographs, contemporary newspaper cuttings from the autumn of 1888, and maps of the murder sites in the surrounding streets. A specialty cocktail was introduced. Tourist coach parties began stopping outside. The pub became one of the destinations on the increasingly busy Ripper-themed walking-tour circuit in East London.

The justification, when one was offered, was that the connection was historical and the trade was simply meeting demand. The pub had a real relationship to the murders. People wanted to see it. The renaming made the relationship explicit. Some argued that anything less than full commemoration was a denial of history.

The counter-argument did not enter mainstream attention until 1988.

The centenary

The hundredth anniversary of the murders fell in autumn 1988. A feminist campaign organisation called Reclaim the Night, which had been founded in 1977 to protest male violence against women in public spaces, used the centenary to call attention to the cultural treatment of the Ripper case. Their argument was simple and not new. The five victims had been women, mostly poor, mostly working as prostitutes in conditions of extreme economic distress. They had been murdered in the most brutal way imaginable. A century later, the man who killed them was a tourist attraction. The women were footnotes. A pub had been renamed after the killer, with the women's death photographs on the walls. A century of cultural attention had reversed the relationship between victim and perpetrator. The pub was the most concentrated example of the reversal.

Reclaim the Night campaigned for the pub's name to be changed back. The campaign got coverage in the Guardian, in Time Out, on the BBC. The pub's owners, the brewery Truman's, considered the publicity, considered the changing demographics of the neighbourhood, and changed the name back to the Ten Bells in 1988. The Ripper memorabilia was removed. The crime-scene photographs came down. The Victorian tiles were left where they had always been.

What changed and what did not

The exterior of the pub today shows no indication of the twelve-year period when it was called The Jack the Ripper. There is a small plaque inside mentioning Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly, presented as factual information rather than commercial product. The pub is again a working pub. It sells real ales. It sells food. It is owned by a small independent operator. The current management has been careful, in interviews, to acknowledge the connection to the murders without monetising it.

The tile work behind the bar is the part of the building that has not changed. The same tiles that were on those walls in 1888 are on those walls now. They are the only physical witnesses to the autumn of the murders that survive in unaltered form. The bar where Mary Jane Kelly drank on the evening of 8 November 1888 is the bar people drink at today.

What this means depends on how you want to read it. One reading is that the building has earned a kind of grim authenticity, that the survival of the tiles makes the pub a real piece of the Ripper geography in a way that no museum exhibit could be. Another reading is that the building is a reminder of the cost of letting a place's worst event become its commercial identity. The decade when the pub was named after the killer is the period East End feminist historians use to mark the moment when Ripper tourism became a measurable industry, with all its consequences for how poor, dead women are still discussed today.

The walking-tour industry has not gone away. There are perhaps six or seven competing Ripper walking tours operating in East London on any given evening, several of which start or end at the Ten Bells. The tours typically draw groups of fifteen to thirty people. The pub's takings on Friday and Saturday nights are partly driven by them. The relationship between commemoration and exploitation, the relationship the 1988 campaign tried to redraw, is still being negotiated. It has not been resolved.

What to look at on the walk

Stand outside the Ten Bells in the dusk. The pub is on the corner facing Christ Church Spitalfields, the early-eighteenth-century Hawksmoor church across Fournier Street. The geometry of the corner is essentially unchanged since 1888. Look at the windows. Most of the windows on the upper floors are original. Look at the tilework as you go in. The blue-and-white floral pattern climbs to about head height around all the walls. Behind the bar, in the corner, is a row of tiles that has been replaced. Everything else is original.

Order a half-pint, sit at one of the corner tables, and look up at the tiles. The pub is closer to a private grief than a public memorial. It does not narrate itself. It just persists, and the people in it choose what to make of it.

The Ten Bells is one stop on the Dark London tour because it is the clearest available example in the city of how London consumes its own horror. The pub's twelve-year period as The Jack the Ripper is part of the building's history now. The reversal of the name is also part. Both decisions were made by people who were thinking about what a pub is for. They came to opposite conclusions, eighty years apart, and the building absorbed both. Buildings in this city tend to.