Flower and Dean Street

. It was described in 1883 as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis". [James Greenwood (1883) "In Strange Company": 158-60, quoted in Jerry White (2007) "London in the Nineteenth Century": 323]

The street was built in the 1650s and rebuilt in parts in the eighteenth. The name evolved from that of two local bricklayers, John Gower and Gowen Deane, who were associated with its construction. 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. Already in 1865 the street was referred to by the artist Ford Madox Brown as the epitome of social degredation 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". [Brown, F.M., Description of Work and other paintings, "Nature and Industrialisaton", pp.316-20]

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. [Jerry White (2007) "London in the Nineteenth Century": 323-49]

In a 2008 Scotland Yard geographical profile of Jack the Ripper, it concluded that he most probably lived in this very street where two of his victims lived. [Jason Bennetto, "Has profiling discovered the real face of Jack the Ripper?", "The Independent", Monday, 20 November 2006]

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