Jack the Ripper walking tour

Who'd have thought that 120 years after some women were murdered in East London, over 100 people would give their Friday nights up to pay £7 to look around the streets these murders took place?

Well, apparently Jack the Ripper did. So did the London Walks company; wisely.

Granted, it may be the cheapest night out London has to offer: equal to the cost of a glass of wine at Her Majesty's Theatre, which we solemnly discovered the following evening. Or a glass of wine anywhere, actually.

Melodramatic Victorian murder mysteries may not be everyone's cup of tea but when you are standing in a dark lamp-lit square in London's East End and the cobbles you are standing on are the very cobbles that the victim's blood was spilt on and siphoned off all those years ago, even the most sober of cynics would move a little closer to their neighbour. Or all 99 of them.

The group (or our half, as we had to be split in two; it is so popular over 100 people came along) started at the literal and figurative City Wall, which is a literal wall and figuratively divides the City and the East End. Half a dozen ravens were nestled in its cracks, paying homage to the legend that when the ravens leave the Tower of London the monarchy will 'fall'. Whatever that means. I just thought it was curious seeing ravens in central London.

Over two hours we hammered the East End pavements from Tower Bridge up to Spitalfields market, stopping every block or so to be enveloped further in the narration of those nights in 1888. The streets were eerily quiet - no cars, no people, not even a beggar. It felt like any other place in the world but London. It felt timeless - with the buildings all in darkness we could have been in any year, especially because the restaurants and shops of Petticoat Lane, Aldgate and Spitalfields were all once warehouses, slaughter houses, doss-houses and matchstick factories built in the mid-1800s and not destroyed during the war. Even the UCL student halls are in a Victorian women's institute, where prostitutes and destitute women and their children could stay for the night and were then kicked out in the morning.

Buildings which catered for their tenants by hanging a rope from one end of the room to the other so vagrants, alcoholics and the ladies of the night could pay two pence and lean against the rope to sleep, are now worth up to a million pounds for a two bedroom flat in the same building.

The Ten Bells, the pub which opened in 1666 and was the drinking establishment of choice for all five victims is still going strong. It can't have changed much in the past 150 years; the walls are mosaiced and chipped, the floors are dirty; the toilets are abhorrent. A sensationalist mind like mine works overtime in a place like that; a place where women got drunk only to be gruesomely murdered hours later... they actually drank in there. What if 'Jack' did too, deciding on his next prostitute to lure and then dismember, from the corner?

Four of the prostitutes were in their 40s; the last victim and by far the most gruesome, Mary Kelly, was 21. Her body was so mutiliated she was unidentifiable; in the end detectives managed to find a small tattoo on a piece of skin, which her boyfriend then identified as being hers (she was found in her house so they already had a clue who she was). Between them, the five prostitutes had 21 children and had all been married at some point.

Suspects have included surgeons, doctors, even the Duke of Clarence (the angle the Jonny Depp film From Hell takes), as well as the classic Victorian accusation that the Jews did it. The murderer was never found, although there have been up to 140 suspects over the years.

A. N. Wilson says in his book The Victorians: "The gleeful way in which the murders are still made a subject of entertainment tells us more about the psychology of those who write or buy the books, or flock to the films, that about the nineteenth century."

But no murders have ever captured the country's attention so vividly; partly due to it being never solved, and also, I think, because the women were prostitutes. Nothing stirs up an image so exotic and removed from everyday life than gin-addled prostitutes staggering through gas-lit alleyways offering their bodies in dirty gowns so they can afford somewhere to sleep that night. In short, easy targets in a shoddy, ignored corner of London that was read about in fascinated disgust merely half a mile away in the townhouses of Bloomsbury over eggs and coffee.

It is a story that Dickens could quite easily have conjured up, but it was real. I guarantee that London Walks will never be out of business as long as the Ripper tour runs.