Roll up, roll up! Blowzabellas! Trugmoldies! Meet the ghosts of London low life!

A theatre promenade around the streets of London's East End offers an alternative take on Guy Ritchie territory. Louise Gray walks on the dark side

Autumnal trendies traipsing off to ShoHo, the latest part of London to be credited by a newly coined soubriquet, might suppress a snigger over what a watchful bishop had to say about Shoreditch and Hoxton in the 1870s. "The East End of London is an area mostly inhabited by the criminal classes," wrote the sensitive cleric. "And St Jude's [at the heart of Brick Lane] is the worst parish in England."

Autumnal trendies traipsing off to ShoHo, the latest part of London to be credited by a newly coined soubriquet, might suppress a snigger over what a watchful bishop had to say about Shoreditch and Hoxton in the 1870s. "The East End of London is an area mostly inhabited by the criminal classes," wrote the sensitive cleric. "And St Jude's [at the heart of Brick Lane] is the worst parish in England."

And yet the East End's latest immigrants would do well to reflect. If Blowzabellas, Drabs, Mawks and Trugmoldies, the third in a series of promenade theatre shows organised by the performance club Duckie, has its way, the Victorian underworld and its echoes will be exposed in inglorious detail. The audience for the show is guided through the streets by MC Amy Lamé as a series of playful tableaux (its title refers to Victorian types of prostitute) reveal the layers of East End social history. It is informed as much by Henry Mayhew's minute categorisation of Victorian class, the reportage of Dickens, and the appalled fantasies of writers such as Conan Doyle as much as by more recent stories: the Krays, the strange disappearance of a man from the derelict synagogue in Princelet Street (the subject of Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein's book Rodinsky's Room) and the sound installations of artist Janet Cardiff.

Blowzabellas... revels in its elision of time. As the audience moves along the route, Marisa Carnesky, whose great-grandparents were Lithuanian immigrants to the East End, appears with her museum of strange women in the same synagogue that Rodinsky once haunted; Chris Green takes up a soapbox as a bogus preacher; Ursula Martinez pops up from beneath a Brick Lane manhole.

Knitting these characters into a present-day scenario has been the responsibility of Neil Bartlett, the writer and artistic director of the Hammersmith Lyric Theatre. "The East End has a legion of mythologies. There is an overlap with the twilight world of the East End and the homosexual," he says.

His own contribution to Blowzabellas... is a monologue entitled "Bette Bourne Does You Good" – a double-edged reference to the reformers who travelled to this heart of darkness with improving intentions. Bourne, an actor with whom Bartlett first worked on A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1986) and who recently won much applause for his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in Resident Alien, appears as the only contemporary. "Bette and I went for a walk to discuss what we might do," says Bartlett, "and by accident we ended up in Toynbee Hall." The Hall, was, he explains, set up in the 1880s by an elite of politically-inspired reformers. "Bette's character reminisces. It's very much a response to a person and a place – the fact that some tiny fact or image can trigger a character, then a story."

Liminality – the idea that society pushes the unacceptable out towards its city limits – is a theme that these artists first explored in 1999 with Duckie's Vauxhall Pleasure Promenade. Here, the performers were ghosts dislocated into the present to explore 300 years of the Thames-side area's history. Vauxhall, it became clear, had long been a place of illicit pleasures – its continuing concentration of gay pubs and clubs is no coincidence – and the Promenade's implicit theme was the resonance created by history and place.

Bartlett is fascinated by the Victorian notion of the horrified tourist descending into the East End. "Even the Shoreditch thing", he says with a sly dig at the area's recent gentrification, "speaks of a vicarious, dangerous pleasure."

'Blowzabellas, Drabs, Mawks and Trugmoldies': Brick Lane, London E1 (020 7737 4043), Tuesday to 20 October