Flower and Dean Street
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Flower and Dean Street was situated at the heart of the Spitalfields rookery in the East End of London. It was described in 1883 as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis".[1]It was built and derived its name from two Whitechapel bricklayers, John Gower and Gowen Deane, in the 1650's and rebuilt in parts in the eighteenth. By the nineteenth century the back gardens of the original tenements had been built over 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 thirty one such places in the street. These, as well as providing accommodation for the desperate and the destitute were a focus for the activities of local thieves and prostitutes. Slum clearance began 1881-83. The sanguinary activities of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper in the area in 1888 prompted further redevelopment. Two of his prostitute victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes resided in two common lodging houses on the street. The scandal of these 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.[2]
