Londoners have always been fascinated by the city’s darker side, from Jack the Ripper tours to ghost walks through forgotten alleyways. In Dark London (Frances Lincoln, £16.99), published on 4 September 2025, social historian Dr Drew Gray seeks to separate myth from history, assembling a casebook of crime, panic and tragedy that shaped the metropolis.
Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment, has built a reputation for making academic research accessible. His earlier works, including Murder Maps and London’s Shadows, have been praised for their rigour and readability. Here, he delivers a book that is part reference, part fireside shocker, part walking tour in print.
The structure is simple and effective: four themed sections: Crime & Punishment, Death & the Supernatural, Dens of Vice & Iniquity, and Disasters & Destitution. These are bookended by a useful introduction and a surprisingly thorough index. This makes Dark London both a dip-in volume and a resource for students of social history.
Jack the Ripper to A Flood of Beer in St Giles
There is no shortage of grisly material. The opening section revisits the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders, when two East End families were brutally killed with a hammer, sending shudders across the city. Elsewhere, Gray recalls the London Burkers of the 1830s, resurrection men who confessed to selling nearly a thousand stolen corpses to medical schools. It is stomach-churning, but fascinating. And naturally, there is the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, which spurned Jack the Ripper.
The tone shifts in Death & the Supernatural, where Gray charts Victorian séances and haunted houses, alongside the “monster mania” of the late 1780s, when attacks on women spiralled into a moral panic about a phantom assailant. In Dens of Vice & Iniquity, he evokes the gin-soaked underworld of gambling dens and brothels, culminating in the headless corpse of the 1875 “Whitechapel Tragedy”. Finally, Disasters & Destitution examines the fires, collapses and epidemics that compounded the suffering of the poor. This includes a flood of beer that tragically claimed the lives of eight people in 1814.
Critics
Where the book succeeds is in its breadth. Gray has an eye for the bizarre anecdote that enlivens a wider social history. His prose is clear and unpretentious, with no excess word, though sometimes the case-study format leads to abrupt shifts in pace. What feels like a brisk, absorbing read in one chapter can slip into a catalogue of curiosities in another.
The endorsements hint at its dual appeal. Dr Rosalind Crone, historian and broadcaster, calls it “innovative and refreshing”, while Paul Begg, author of Jack the Ripper: The Facts, praises it as a book that once picked up is “hard to put down”. Both are right, though readers in search of narrative sweep may wish for stronger connective tissue between episodes.
Dark London achieves what it sets out to do. It reminds us that the city’s history is as much written in blood, gin and soot as it is in bricks and bridges. Gray invites us to look again at a familiar cityscape and see the shadows lingering at its edges.
Dark London
Dark London (Frances Lincoln, £16.99), was published on 4 September 2025. It is available online at Amazon as well as in some bookstores.