#mitre square

Carnival Row is an American neo-noir fantasy web television series created by René Echevarria and Travis Beacham that premiered on Amazon Prime Video on August 30, 2019, and it is based in a film script written in 2005 by Beacham. 

Carnival Row follows "mythical creatures who have fled their war-torn homeland and gathered in the city as tensions are simmering between citizens and the growing immigrant population." At the center of the drama is the investigation into a string of unsolved murders, madness of power, unresolved love, and social adjustments eating away at whatever uneasy peace exists.

The police inspector Rycroft "Philo" Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) stands in contrast to the world at large and the murders he has to solve, which in the original 2005 script their victims were all faerie sex workers killed in ghastly ways. The perpetrator was soon named "Unseelie Jack," likely a reference to the 1880s serial killer Jack the Ripper, who is widely but wrongly believed that similarly targeted only female sex workers. 

In the second episode, titled "Aisling", Rycroft  investigates the murder of a mysterious fae, Aisling Querelle (Erika Stárková, pictured above).

When we watched it, our first thought was Catherine Eddowes, looking at the way she was lying on the floor, disemboweled like this, and the character was a woman who's life went downhill and ended up in poverty, just like Kate’s (picture below).

[The sketch of Catherine Eddowes' body, as found in London's Mitre Square in 1888, drawn by Frederick William Foster, the City surveyor.]

We wondered if this was a kind of rememberance to these poor women who ended up living in poverty and were killed in that brutal way. In the series the killer is caught, we only wish in real life it really happened as well, in order to make justice to these poor women who didn’t deserve ending the way they did.

Mitre Square

Mitre Square is a small square in the City of London. It measures about 77 feet (23 m) by 80 feet (24 m) and is connected via three passages with Mitre Street to the SW, to Creechurch Place to the NW and, via St James's Passage (formerly Church Passage), to Duke's Place to the NE.

The square occupies the site of the cloister of Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate which was demolished under Henry VIII at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The south corner of the square was the site of the murder of Catherine Eddowes by "Jack the Ripper". Her mutilated body was found there at 1:45 in the morning on 30 September 1888. This was the westernmost of the Whitechapel Murders and the only one located within the City.

Eddowes' murder on the site of the old monastery is ascribed to an ancient curse in a contemporary penny dreadful entitled The Curse Upon Mitre Square A.D. 1530–1888 by J.F. Brewer.

Photos from: Casebook

Artillery Passage

Go through Artillery Lane until meet Artillery Passage. This street seems to bring you back into the Medieval London. During the time of the Ripper Murders lots of Whitechapel Streets were very similar to this one. 

In a small row that crosses Artillery Passage we found this picture of Jack the Ripper and the white face beside it. It is the only witness that remains in the narrow streets of Whitechapel and Spittafields to remind you the turbulent past of this neighbourhood. 

As I came back the 15th August 2012 I could see this painting no longer exists... 

Mitre Square

Turn left and go down the Middlesex Street until meet Whitechapel high Street. Walk through Whitechapel High Street and go through the Aldgate Underground Station. Here the street name changes into Aldgate High Street. Keep on walking through Aldgate High Street cross Dukes Place and keep on walking untill meet Mitre Street. Walk through Mitre Street and turn right to Mitre Square where Catherine Eddowes was killed on the night of the "Double Event", on 30th September 1888. She was last seen alive in St James's Passage talking to an stranger man who is believed to be Jack the Ripper by Joseph Lawende and a friend. It was around 1.30 am. Today in this passage there is a mark on the wall reminding Catherine Eddowes. Her body was found twenty minutes later in Mitre Square, between the tree and the bench that are today there. 

This is Mitre Street, on the right is Mitre Suare.

Panoramic view of Mitre Square. Mitre Street is on the right and St James's Passage is on the left. The arrow indicates where more or less her body was found. 

St James's Passage mark where Catherine Eddowes was last seen alive.

Victorian Pubs

Go back to Aldgate High Street and walk 'till Somerset Street where there is the Still and Star Pub. In the 1880's around that pub there were lots of slaughter houses, and if the theory that Jack the Ripper was a butcher it's true, he would have gone to this pub and had some drink. Keep on walking through Aldgate High Street and you'll find another ancient pub: Hoop and Grapes, which is the oldest pub in London, built in the early 1600's and was one of the few buildings that survived The Great Fire of London in 1666.