London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
Closing fast now. I get teased. And indeed wondered at. “You’re putting out a podcast every single day? My god, you’ve fashioned a rod for your back.”
Well, it may look that way. That’s outside looking in. Inside, here, it doesn’t feel that way at all. I’ve got a healthy helping of that London Walks guide trait: passionate curiosity. London Calling, this podcast, is my sandbox. My playpen. The place where I can let that trait – that passionate curiosity – romp. Let it go where it will. No advertisers, nobody leaning on me telling me to do this or that. It’s my playpen, my toys, I can go where I want, do what I want. If there’s a tether, it’s London. Make these pieces London-related. But even that is not a strait-jacket. If I fancy going off piste I go off piste. The whole project, it suits me. It’s fun. I like digging and finding out. In the immortal words of a great American pal, a fellow journalist, “all I ever wanted to do was tell stories.” I’m with you on that, Jim. And if there are a few hundred people out there who share my interests – particularly my passion for London – I mean the place is a patchwork of astonishments, what’s not to like – well, no bones about it, I like that too. It’s nice to know I’m not just talking to myself. And hey, I even taken a shine to the analytics, the counter. That side of it, well, I think of it as the podcast equivalent the Yankee Clipper, Joe Dimaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. My hitting streak here, the record was and is 420 consecutive days of putting out a London Walks podcast. That was a couple of years ago. And, yes, I did finally hit the wall. The streak ground to a halt after 420 days. But a week or so later I was at it again. June 23rd, 2025 I saddled up and took off again. You can do the maths. I’m now about 410 days on. So, yes, closing fast on that 420 consecutive days mark. Pretty confident we’ll sail right past it. And, yes, I’m naturally curious about how long I’ll be able to run this current streak out to. We’ll see.
And if anybody’s wondering, London Calling is also fast closing on the half million mark. 500,000 listens since it got going, what, six or seven years ago. And you chaps and chapettes, the people who stop by here, you might like to know that your fellow listeners are all over the world. If the analytics are telling it like it is, there are London Calling listeners in about 25 different countries. The largest single contingent – no surprises here – the land of my birth. Second largest, right here. Blighty. Great Britain. Third largest, Canada. And so on down to, in some instances, countries I’ve barely heard of.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. A one off foreword. Let’s get on to our main fare. Here’s your daily London fix for August 7th, 2026.
Ask almost anyone to name the first victim of Jack the Ripper and they’ll tell you Mary Ann Nichols.
Reasonable answer.
Wrong answer.
Because eight days before Polly Nichols was murdered another woman was butchered in Whitechapel.
Her name was Martha Tabram.
She was a Londoner. Thirty-nine years old. She was stabbed 39 times.
Each of those stab wounds a candle blown out. Coincidences don’t come much grimmer than that.
Martha Tabram was homeless.
And in the early hours of August 7th,1888, she was stabbed. Once. Twice.
And again.
And again.
Thirty-nine times.
One of those wounds pierced her heart.
She died on a first-floor landing in George Yard Buildings, just off Whitechapel High Street.
Today she’s usually given an asterisk.
“Possibly.”
“Maybe.”
“Not one of the Canonical Five.”
History has quietly shuffled her to one side.
But perhaps it shouldn’t.
Because whether or not the same man killed her, Martha Tabram marks the beginning of what became known as the Autumn of Terror.
There are some places that, once you know their story, you can never look at in quite the same way again.
For me, one of them is a first-floor landing.
Any first-floor landing.
There’s something oddly intimate about one.
You’re neither inside nor outside.
Somebody’s front door is only a few feet away.
You lower your voice.
You don’t linger.
Now imagine a woman being stabbed thirty-nine times there.
Imagine waking in the flat beyond the wall.
Imagine opening your front door at six o’clock that morning.
Because that’s what happened at George Yard Buildings.
The murder didn’t take place in some lonely field.
Or in a deserted alley.
It happened on the first-floor landing of a block of working-class flats.
There were doors opening onto that landing.
Families lived behind them.
Men, women and children were asleep only a few feet away.
Did nobody hear the blows?
Did nobody hear a cry?
Did somebody wake, listen for a moment, then pull the bedclothes over their head?
We’ll never know.
George Yard Buildings was one of Victorian London’s new “model dwellings”, built to provide decent, respectable homes for working people.
Several storeys high, with outside staircases and open landings, they represented progress. Better housing. Better sanitation. Better lives.
And yet one August night in 1888 those very buildings became one of the most notorious addresses in criminal history.
Martha Tabram hadn’t begun life on the margins.
She’d been born Martha White.
She married Henry Samuel Tabram, a warehouse foreman.
They had two sons.
For a while hers was an ordinary London life.
Then everything unravelled.
The marriage came unstuck.
Drink took hold.
Money disappeared.
Like so many women in Whitechapel she found herself living from hand to mouth, staying in common lodging houses and sometimes selling sex simply to survive.
That’s an important distinction.
London Walks guide Richard Walker, in his excellent book Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper – How the Victorians Created the World’s Greatest Murder Mystery, argues that these women weren’t simply “prostitutes”, as generations of writers have lazily labelled them.
They were women whose lives had fallen apart.
Women abandoned by the society that should have protected them.
That feels a much fairer way of looking at Martha Tabram.
And now we zero in. Bank Holiday Monday, 6 August 1888.
Martha spent the evening drinking.
Witnesses later saw her in the company of soldiers.
Then she disappeared into the East End night.
Some time between about a quarter to two and half past three in the morning she was murdered.
The post-mortem was horrifying.
Thirty-nine stab wounds.
Most inflicted with a small knife.
One, driven through the breastbone, may have been made with a longer, stronger weapon.
That single wound has fuelled arguments ever since.
Two knives?
Two killers?
Or one murderer using whatever came to hand?
The police concentrated on tracing the soldier she’d last been seen with.
Nothing came of it.
Then, just over three weeks later, on 31 August, Polly Nichols was murdered in Buck’s Row.
Everything changed.
And this is where Richard Walker makes another fascinating point.
Whitechapel had known violent crime before.
Murders weren’t new.
What was new was the age in which these murders happened.
Britain had entered the era of mass-circulation newspapers.
The Star.
The Pall Mall Gazette.
The new journalism.
Every edition had to outsell yesterday’s.
Every headline had to be bigger.
Every crime had to be more shocking.
The murders and the newspapers fed each other.
Each fresh killing produced more fear.
More readers.
More copies sold.
The killer wasn’t simply hunted.
The legend was created.
Within weeks the journalist George R. Sims could write that London was living through “dullish times” except for “these Whitechapel crimes.”
The myth had already taken hold.
Jack the Ripper had become more than a murderer.
He had become a global story.
And Martha Tabram was there at the beginning.
She stands on the threshold between two worlds.
Before her, Whitechapel’s murders were local tragedies.
After her, they became an international obsession.
There’s another thought that has stayed with me.
Three years later the 1891 Census was taken.
George Yard Buildings was still there.
People were still living there.
Dock labourers.
Tailors.
Costermongers.
Widows.
Children.
Breakfasts were cooked.
Boots were laced.
People hurried off to work.
Life had quietly reclaimed the building.
Yet every one of those residents must have known that only a short time before, outside one of those front doors, a woman had been butchered.
That’s London.
The city absorbs everything.
Even horror.
Anniversaries are opportunities.
Opportunities to remember the people who’ve slipped into the footnotes.
Everyone remembers Jack the Ripper.
Far fewer remember Martha Tabram.
Perhaps they should.
Because before there was “Jack the Ripper”…
Before there were the lurid headlines…
Before there were the books, the films and the endless theories…
There was simply Martha Tabram.
A woman.
A wife.
A mother.
A Londoner whose life had gone catastrophically wrong.
A woman who died alone on a first-floor landing.
Died alone. Really? If she had been alone she wouldn’t have died. She wasn’t alone. She was with the monster who stabbed her 39 times in that frenzy, of almost unimaginable violence. And right there, also, on the other side of those thin walls, the tenants of George Yard Buildings lay in their beds. Scores of them. Were they fast asleep? Did somebody wake, listen for a moment, then turn over? Did someone hear a muffled cry and decide it was none of their business? We’ll never know.
And here we are, 138 years later. Voyeurs. Looking on. Powerless to intervene.
From that vantage point all we can do – all you can do – is shudder. And know that you’ve lost a bit of your innocence.
Know that once you’ve learnt Martha Tabram’s story, you’ll never look at a first-floor landing in quite the same way again.
See you tomorrow.