Hampton Court Palace/On the Trail of Jack the Ripper

Today was spent at Hampton Court Palace, one of Henry VIII's sixty places of residence. It was an on-again-off-again rainy day, and we took the train out to the palace. There were quite a few people coming and going, as a huge flower show was being held there. On our way back, we saw people ahead of us hurrying to the train with carts full of beautiful flowers they had bought there. My favorite part of the palace happens to be the royal kitchens. Today they have reenactments of how things were done in Henry's day, and we saw a gentleman stoking a fire getting ready to roast some tasty-looking beef. In another room were bins of vegetables, while in several other rooms were pastries and meat pies laid out in various stages of baking. There are quite a number of food preparation rooms, and in Henry's day this would have been a major undertaking. Hampton Court originally belonged to Cardinal Wolsey, but Henry took a liking to it and began dropping hints. Wolsey, being a shrewd man, likely thought things over and decided his head was more important than his house, because he eventually ended by presenting the house to Henry as a gift. Elizabeth I and William and Mary are among the other sovereigns to live there.

In the evening, a number of us met at the Tower Hill tube stop to take the Jack the Ripper walking tour. Although there are not many of Whitechapel's old buildings left to see, our guide gave us a very informative narrative of what occurred at the time of the murders, while walking us to the locations of several of them. He even produced a top hat and allowed two of our group to reenact a murder at one point. We traced the path of the Ripper from victim number three, to victim number four, to the place where he dropped off an evidentiary kidney. It was quite an entertaining evening.