Flower and Dean Street

It was one of the most notorious slums of the Victorian era, being described in 1883 as "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis",[1] and was closely associated with the victims of Jack the Ripper.

They split the tenterground into two long parcels and employed two bricklayers, John Flower and Gowan Dean,[2] to build houses along its length.

By the nineteenth century the back gardens of the original tenements had been built on for narrow courts and alleys and the area had become a slum.

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".

[4] The scandal of the 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.