Whitechapel is a town in Middlesex forming part of the East End of London. It is all contiguous with the metropolitan conurbation, roughly bounded by the Bishopsgate thoroughfare on the west, Brady Street and Cavell Street on the east and The Highway on the south.
The town best known in the wider world for the infamous Jack the Ripper murders in the late s, though there is a great deal more to Whitechapel than the misdeeds of a brief time. Whitechapel's heart is Whitechapel High Street, extending further east as Whitechapel Road, named after a small chapel of ease dedicated to St Mary.
The church's earliest known rector was Hugh de Fulbourne in Around the chapel became the parish church of Whitechapel, called, for unknown reasons, St Mary Matfelon. The church was destroyed through enemy action in Second World War and its location and graveyard is now a public garden on the south side of the road. Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road are now part of the A11 road, anciently the initial part of the Roman road between the City of London and Colchester , leaving the city at Aldgate.
By the late 16th century the suburb of Whitechapel and the surrounding area had started becoming 'the other half' of London. Located east of Aldgate, outside the City Walls and beyond official controls, it attracted the less fragrant activities of the city, particularly tanneries, breweries, foundries including the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which later cast Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and London's Big Ben and slaughterhouses. Mary Matfellon, bequeathed a legacy for the education of forty boys and thirty girls of the parish — the Davenant Centre is still in existence although the Davenant Foundation School moved from Whitechapel to Loughton in Population shifts from rural areas to London from the 17th century to the midth century resulted in great numbers of more or less destitute people taking up residence amidst the industries and mercantile interests that had attracted them.
In the body of the sailor Richard Parker, hanged for his leading role in the Nore mutiny, was given a Christian burial at Whitechapel after his wife exhumed it from the unconsecrated burial ground to which it was originally consigned. Crowds gathered to see the body before it was buried.
