# Flower and Dean Street

* This article is part of a series aboutJack the Ripper
Whitechapel murders
Annie Chapman
Catherine Eddowes
Mary Jane Kelly
Mary Ann Nichols
Elizabeth Stride
Speculated
Emma Elizabeth Smith
Martha Tabram
Thames Torso Murders
Whitehall Mystery
Locations
Buck's Row
Dorset Street
Flower and Dean Street
Hanbury Street
Mitre Square
Ten Bells
Letters and clues
"Dear Boss" letter
"Saucy Jacky" postcard
"From Hell" letter
Openshaw letter
Goulston Street graffito
Investigators
Frederick Abberline
Robert Anderson
Walter Andrews
Thomas Arnold
Walter Dew
George Godley
Melville Macnaghten
Henry Moore
Edmund Reid
Donald Swanson
Charles Warren
Adolphus Williamson
Whitechapel Vigilance Committee
George Lusk
Doctors and coroners
Wynne Edwin Baxter
Thomas Bond
Roderick Macdonald
Thomas Horrocks Openshaw
George Bagster Phillips
Witnesses
George Hutchinson
Joseph Lawende
Charles Allen Lechmere
Israel Schwartz
Suspects
Montague Druitt
Jacob Isenschmid
George Chapman
Aaron Kosminski
Michael Ostrog
John Pizer
James Thomas Sadler
Francis Tumblety
William Henry Bury
Thomas Neill Cream
Thomas Hayne Cutbush
Frederick Bailey Deeming
Carl Feigenbaum
Robert Donston Stephenson
Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale
Joseph Barnett
Willy Clarkson
William Gull
George Hutchinson
James Kelly
Charles Allen Lechmere
Jacob Levy
James Maybrick
Michael Maybrick
Walter Sickert
Joseph Silver
James Kenneth Stephen
Sir John Williams, 1st Baronet, of the City of London
L. Forbes Winslow
Mary Pearcey
Legacy
In fiction
Jack the Ripper Museum :
vte :
Flower and Dean Street was a road at the heart of the Spitalfields rookery in the East End of London. It was one of the most notorious slums of the Victorian era, 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.
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 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-houses 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 as the epitome of social degradation in his description of his painting Work. 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 began 1881–83. In 1888, the Whitechapel murders by the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper prompted further redevelopment. Two of those women murdered, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, resided in two common lodging-houses 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.
The Flower and Dean Walk housing estate is directly across Commercial Street from the historic site of the street.