Peabody Trust helps Docklands museum unlock the mystery of Jack the Ripper » Housing » 24dash.com

One of London’s oldest social housing associations, Peabody Trust has helped The Museum in Docklands unlock the mystery to what life was like in London’s East End, during the reign of terror imposed by Jack the Ripper.

The Museum in Docklands’ Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition, which opened this week, will display several Peabody artefacts which date back to the 1880s.

Peabody Trust donated a four-foot laundry mangle and a set of keys taken from a Victorian estate to provide exhibition attendees with an insight into 19th century life on a housing estate. 

The story of Jack the Ripper is an integral part of London’s identity. His horrendous crimes gained such media attention that was paramount in bringing the issues of housing, crime and poverty into the public realm.

Being one of the earliest and largest owners of working-class housing for Londoners,  Peabody Trust's role in the exhibition was to help unlock the myths of what social housing life was like in Victorian times.

Peabody Trust’s legal assistant, Christine Wagg said: "We are very proud to have been able to assist the museum by providing some objects which help illustrate living conditions on a Peabody estate in the late 19th century. Our involvement will help inform the general public about life in the 1880s and establish the importance of Peabody Trust’s place in history."

By 1888 the Trust owned 5,000 dwellings housing 20,000 people. Jack the Ripper victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was also a Peabody Trust resident. She lived on a Peabody estate with her husband before they split up and she moved to Whitechapel- the scene of Jack the Ripper's crimes. 

The Museum of Docklands exhibition explores how the murders were a huge catalyst for change, creating public revulsion at the desperate state of life in the shadows of the world’s richest city.

The spate of crimes shaped the way London and in particular the East End is imagined.  As renowned social historian, Jerry White once said: "Within six years ... Jack the Ripper had done more to destroy the Flower and Dean St. rookery than fifty years of road building, slum clearance and unabated pressure from police, Poor Law Guardians, vestries and sanitary officers."