Days Out: Ripper tours in London

So who needs Johnny Depp?

I'm admiring the floodlit Tower of London when our guide, Donald Rumbelow, leaps on to a blue plastic stool and booms out an account of its 900 years of violence and murder.

The 30-strong group is gripped. Don swiftly brings us up to August 1888, just before the "autumn of terror", when a soldiers' prostitute was stabbed 39 times just outside the Tower's walls. I'm glad we've got an ex-City of London cop to take us through this blood-soaked corner of the city. Don is also the man to whom Johnny Depp turned when preparing for his role as Inspector Fred Abberline in the new film From Hell, based on the Ripper story (see Nick Barber's review, page 8).

We turn into a yard overlooked by ordinary offices. In 1888, this was the site of one of Saucy Jack's murders. "In films, an East End prostitute wears a cartwheel hat with feathers, and is usually belting out a song, clutching a tankard of gin," says Don. In reality, they were street sleepers. Their teeth were often missing and they wore men's boots, "good for walking the streets or kicking a customer". They would sell themselves for tuppence or a loaf of stale bread. The gin is accurate, though.

During the two-hour walk, we hear a litany of women's names – Polly, Mary, Catherine, Mary, Annie, Long Liz – and, again and again, the chilling description: "She was found, her throat cut to the spine; her body ripped from vagina to breastbone." I'm grateful I picked Don's tour rather than one of the walks offering pictures of the victims. "Remember," he says, "this was 17 years before the first conviction on fingerprint evidence, and such was the state of scientific knowledge at the time that they couldn't tell the difference between human and animal blood." A difficult case for Inspector Abberline.

At St Botolph's, Aldgate, the prostitute's church, we stop to hear how they used it as a roundabout, circling fast around the back where there were no customers and strolling slowly across the front hoping for custom.

Then it's on to the doorway, now flanked by a Happy Days chip shop and a money changer advertising in Cyrillic, where the Ripper left his message on the wall. To get to the Ten Bells, the pub where many of the victims drank, we cut through the bare stalls of Spitalfields market and a school of in-line skaters.

On the street again, we gawp like Dickensian orphans into the windows of renovated Huguenot silkweavers' houses in Fournier Street, then make for a multi-storey car park by the site of the last killing. Don sums up the theories and suspects. "Books and authors have muddied the story," he tells us. "The number of victims is usually set at five, but some think the Ripper killed as many as 14 – though that author counted one victim twice." The door to 1888 bangs shut on its terrible story. The neon-bright curry houses of Brick Lane beckon, just a few minutes' walk away, reassuringly in the present.

Don Rumbelow is one of the guides for Original London Walks (020-7624 3978). Other Ripper walks include Mystery Walks (020-8558 9446) and Guided Walks in London (020-7243 1097).