The Ten Bells (a.k.a. the Jack the Ripper pub)

The reason The Ten Bells is nicknamed the "Jack the Ripper" pub, is because two of the Ripper's victims were reportedly patrons of it, and one in particular--the prostitute Mary Kelly--was last seen outside the Ten Bells early in the morning of November 9, 1888, before she was found brutally murdered. In fact, for a brief stint in then 80s, the pub was actually renamed to "The Jack the Ripper," which is kind of cheesy and I'm glad it regained its haunting original moniker.

The Ten Bells is right on the corner of Commercial and Fashion streets, and the first thing I said when I saw it was "It looks like the power is out." And it did. It was completely black inside and out, the darkest building on the street--like the light was unnaturally snuffed out right at the corner, leaving The Bells alone and shadowed.

The interior has remained largely unchanged since the 1800s. The inside is made of wood, wood everywhere. It creaks under you, and the walls are tiled. On the far north wall there's this awesome mural/painting thing called "Spitalfields in the Olden Time."

In case you can't tell, the setting here stole the show for me. I did drink some beer that night, though, so let's let's get to that. The first beer I had was called Bombardier (pronounced "bomb-ba-deer"), and it kind of made me sick. I had two pints of it and by the second one it tasted like high octane malt liquor.

After my last swags of Bombardier, I decided to try what my English pal Harry was drinking: John Smith's "bitter." It succeeded in taking the taste of Bombardier out of my mouth with its more active punch and fruity taste, but other than that it wasn't that eventful. It was "ok," but nothing more.

Unfortunately everything else The Ten Bells had on tap was typical stuff you could find in America: Heineken, Fosters, stuff like that.

One last thing to note about The Ten Bells--and the Spitalfields area in general--is the crowd. I described it to my English pals as reminding me of Berkeley: words like indie/sweaters/rock/punk, all of those things fit. The young fashion-aware group, nice and not very rowdy.


A trip downstairs to the loo solidified this vibe, as it looked like the bathroom at Gilman St., in Berkeley itself.

This was only the beginning of a pretty epic night in London. We eventually ended up in the street, arms around each other, singing and swaying at like 4:00 AM. Jack the Ripper would have sliced us to bits for having that much fun.