Jack the Ripper’s Limerick victim

Teeming with common lodging houses, and home to a criminal underworld of murderers, pornographers and child gangs, TV show Ripper Street is back tonight for a second series.

The series is again filmed in the streets of Dublin, rather than London’s East End, where it is set in the spring of 1890, a year and a half after the last of Jack the Ripper’s killings. Tiger Aspect Production’s head of drama, Will Gould, promises “another unforgettable walk on the wild side” of Whitechapel.

So great was the number of Irish immigrants who settled in the East End slums after the Famine that it came to be nicknamed ‘Little Dublin’. Some found casual labour in the docks and markets; many trundled wheelbarrows through the streets, selling nuts and oranges. A few, such as Mary Jane Kelly, became prostitutes.