Nail in the coffin for Jack the Ripper tour

THEY have been a grisly staple of the tourist scene for decades – but Jack the Ripper walking tours have been dropped by the Ordnance Survey library of maps.

Britain’s official mapping body has until recently provided a route salaciously entitled ‘Guts and Garters in the Ripper’s East End’ for tourists to take in the London sites of the unsolved 1888 killings, giving chilling details of the ways in which the five victims died.

But following complaints about the glorification of the unnamed killer, the map for the three-mile route through Whitechapel is no longer available.

Ordnance Survey last week said it has been removed following a request from the AA, which helps supply online material for its maps. The AA confirmed this saying the Ripper tour ‘did not meet current editorial standards’.

Author Hallie Rubenhold, who has written a book about the victims’ lives called The Five, agrees with Ordnance Survey’s decision. She said: ‘Jack the Ripper tours have existed since the day of the first murder, but just because we did it a long time ago doesn’t make it right.’

John Biggs, mayor of Tower Hamlets, which includes Whitechapel, also backed the decision as the borough ‘objected to the commercialisation of violence against women and girls’.

Rupert Wheeler, chairman of local preservation group the Spitalfields Society, however, said that the Ripper story remained a part of Whitechapel’s history, adding: ‘ It isn’t going to go away just because you don’t talk about it.’