Five women were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888. They had names — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly — and most of them were not, as the received story goes, prostitutes. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five makes the case that at least three of them were homeless women who couldn’t scrape together fourpence for a lodging house bed. They were killed in the streets because that’s where they slept.

Some of them had their last drinks in the pubs on this crawl. Martha Tabram was at The White Hart on the evening of 7 August 1888 before she was stabbed 39 times in the alley behind the pub. Annie Chapman was drinking alone at The Ten Bells on the morning of 8 September. Mary Jane Kelly was a regular there and picked up clients on the pavement outside. These are facts, not atmosphere — the pubs are still standing, still serving, and still trading on the connection to varying degrees.

The differences are worth paying attention to. The Ten Bells is the most famous Ripper pub in the world, Grade II listed, and in 1976 a landlord renamed it “The Jack the Ripper” and filled it with murder memorabilia. It took a twelve-year Reclaim the Night campaign to force the brewery to change the name back. The Culpeper, formerly the Princess Alice, has gone the opposite direction: gutted, refurbished, five floors of exposed brick and a rooftop herb garden. Nothing inside tells you that John Pizer used to threaten women with a knife here, or that Frances Coles was last seen alive walking out the door. The Pride of Spitalfields has done neither — it’s an unreconstructed Victorian boozer where the Ripper era is preserved by accident rather than design.

The route is short. Five pubs across half a mile of Whitechapel and Spitalfields — you could walk it in twenty minutes without stopping. You start at The White Hart on Whitechapel High Street and end at The Golden Heart on Commercial Street, steps from Durward Street where Polly Nichols’ body was found. In between, every evening, half a dozen walking tour operators lead groups through the same streets. They’ve been doing it nightly for decades. The pubs have outlasted the controversy, the campaigns, and the refurbishments. They’ll outlast the tours too.