Historical investigation map
Whitechapel, 1888: places, movements and uncertainty
Every marker opens its claims, passages, people and timeline entries. Uncertain positions are drawn as uncertain. Proposed routes are dashed and labelled; they are not evidence.
Base map: Booth's poverty map, published 1889 (a year after the murders), georeferenced by this site to about ±10–15 m. Colours are Booth's social classes, not crime data. Details and limits
Charles Booth, Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889, North-Eastern sheet (Whitechapel and Spitalfields extract). Wellcome Collection (L0074439), via Wikimedia Commons. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Source file (opens in a new tab).
Derived image Georeferenced by this site: the 1889 scan was warped to fit modern coordinates using 9 surviving street junctions (RMS error about 10 m, worst 15 m).
Published 1889, the year after the murders, and drawn on an Ordnance Survey base: details may differ from August 1888. Colours show Booth's 1889 classification of each street's inhabitants (his own, now-dated categories, from black 'lowest class' to gold 'wealthy'); they are not records of the murders. Location markers are positioned from this site's readings of the 1891-5 OS 1:1,056 plan, not from this image, so marker and image can disagree by 10-30 m.
Legend
- Crime scene
- Witness or police observation
- Address or landmark
- Uncertain position (hollow, dashed circle)
- Documented movement (solid; straight because the path is not documented)
- Proposed route (dashed; not documented)
- Circle = uncertainty radius (uncertainty_m)
- Group of places that overlap at this zoom (select to expand)
- Group that includes a crime scene
4 line labels shown; 6 hidden where they would overlap a marker or another label (zoom in, or hover a line). 3 numbered groups of overlapping places: select one to expand. Hover, focus or select a marker to see its name.
List of places (19): text alternative to the map
- Approximate ±20 m · scenes
- Approximate ±20 m · addresses
- Approximate ±25 m · addresses
- Approximate ±20 m · addresses
- Approximate ±25 m · observations
- Approximate ±30 m · observations
- Uncertain ±75 m · addresses
- Approximate ±40 m · addresses
- Uncertain ±60 m · addresses
- Approximate ±40 m · observations
- Uncertain ±80 m · addresses
- Uncertain ±100 m · addresses
- Approximate ±90 m · addresses
- Uncertain ±150 m · addresses
- Uncertain not placed · addresses
- Approximate ±25 m · addresses
- Uncertain ±120 m · addresses
- Approximate ±50 m · addresses
- Approximate ±40 m · addresses
Travel-time calculator
A calculated route is not evidence that anyone walked it. It shows only how long the walk would take under the assumptions below.
Distance 651 m ± 10% → walk 7.3–9.0 min.
Arrival: 03:37–03:39
- Route status: proposed route (not documented) — Cross documented only the street names "Parson street", "Brady street", "Buck's row" (ES/MA, Echo). "Parson street" was NOT located on the 1891-5 plan for this site, so the Cambridge Rd/Darling Row segment is a stand-in.
- Accuracy: Vertices hand-read from NLS 1891-5 OS tiles / Nominatim; polyline follows street centrelines only approximately; expect +-10% on distance.
- Speed range from Wikipedia: Preferred walking speed · Wikipedia 'Preferred walking speed' ; a person hurrying, loitering or stopping is not modelled.
- Start time is your input, not a documented time.