Museum billed as celebration of London women opens as Jack the Ripper exhibit
(and, blaming the women--" HOW women got into this situation in the first place"
Museum billed as celebration of London women opens as Jack the Ripper exhibit
Museum branded a ‘sick joke’ after obtaining planning permission by promising ‘the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history’
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A new museum originally billed as a celebration of east London women and the suffragettes has been branded a “sick joke” by local residents after it opened as a venue dedicated to the crimes of Jack the Ripper. In the planning application for the site, a few hundred metres from the Tower of London, residents were promised “the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history”. It was approved by Tower Hamlets council earlier this year.
But it was only when the covers came down last week that residents found the museum’s subject matter had changed so dramatically. The Ripper was the name given to the man behind a series of barbarous and unsolved murders of sex workers in London’s East End between 1888 and 1891. He has never been definitively identified.
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The man behind the venture is Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, a former diversity chief at Google. The detailed planning document sent last July by his architects, Waugh Thisleton, in support of the building’s conversion from disused flats into a museum, included pictures of suffragettes and 1970s Asian women campaigning against racial murders around Brick Lane.
It said: “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 document cited the closure of Whitechapel’s Women’s Library in Old Castle Street in 2013 to stress that the “Museum of Women’s History”, as it was billed, would be “the only dedicated resource in the East End to women’s history”.
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http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/29/museum-billed-as-celebration-of-london-women-opens-as-jack-the-ripper-exhibit
