A new London museum that the owners claimed would celebrate women's rights is actually all about nineteenth century rapist and murderer Jack the Ripper, much to the disgust of locals who say he didn't even operate in their neighborhood.
“This is just exploitation which is historically and totally inaccurate. This is really sordid and against women of the past and completely unacceptable," Jenny Boswell-Jones, a resident of the East London neighborhood, told the East London Advertiser.
Residents said that while Jack the Ripper was active in other parts of East London, he had no history in their neighborhood.
“But Cable Street had nothing to do with Jack the Ripper—that was in Whitechapel, not here. It’s misleading to tourists,” another local, Jemima Broadbridge, told the Advertiser.
The Advertiser reports that the museum's development proposal submitted last summer called the development a "Museum of Women's History" and said they would be building a tribute to women in British history, from sufragettes to immigrant women fighting for their rights.
“The museum will recognise and celebrate the women of the East End who have shaped history, telling the story of how they have been instrumental in changing society. It will analyse the social, political and domestic experience from the Victorian period to the present day,” the development proposal said, according to the Advertiser.
There was no mention of sufragettes or women's rights on the museum's facade when it was unveiled last week.
“But they took down the hoarding last week and revealed the shop front of a museum celebrating London’s most notorious murderer of women—it seems like a sick joke,” local filmmaker Julian Cole told London 24.
A former head of diversity at Google in the UK, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, is behind the museum, according to the Evening Standard.
“We did plan to do a museum about social history of women but as the project developed we decided a more interesting angle was from the perspective of the victims of Jack the Ripper," he told the newspaper. “It is absolutely not celebrating the crime of Jack the Ripper but looking at why and how the women got in that situation in the first place.”
The local council told the Evening Standard they can't do much about the museum's change in subject matter, but that they're looking into any possible unauthorized work on the building.