La · Belle · Fille · Qui · Rêve

Found this in the most recent edition of Rue Morgue magazine.  Am going to plan a visit round the Sweeney Todd locations, so thought it would be useful to use this to refer back to.

A Nightmare on Fleet Street by Jovanka Vuckovic and James Burrell

Unlike Jack the Ripper, there is still speculation about whether or not England’s most notorious boogeyman actually existed.  In two books, writer Peter Haining posited Sweeney Todd as a historical serial killer who slashed throats at his barber shop on Fleet Street around 1800, yet there is no concrete evidence to support his claims.  No public records are known to exist documenting Todd’s arrest and execution, or that or Mrs. Lovett, the apparent accomplice who would bake his victims into meat pieces at her shop down the street.  It’s most likely that Thomas Peckett Prest, who first wrote the urban legend into a story (“The String of Pearls”) in 1847, was inspired by the various crimes reported in The Old Bailey section of the London Times.

The product of apocryphal storytelling or not, the sinister, mysterious allure of Fleet Street’s bloody barber remains strong nearly 200 years after he (supposedly) cut his first throat.  His continued presence in literature, plays and cinema keeps his ruthless, cannibalistic myth alive and often brings the morbidly curious to London, England’s 186 Fleet Street – the purported former location of Todd’s barbaric barber shop.

According to lore, the shop stood at the side of a long, dark and narrow alleyway that still exists – Hen and Chicken Court, located at the corner of Fetter Lane,  Now an innocuous Kall Kwick print and copy store, 186 Fleet Street – which local sightseeing tours are quick to mention as the “location of the Sweeney Todd murders!” – attracts many tourist hoping to get a glimpse of the cellar where the bodies of his victims would have fallen from the trap door in the ceiling. Unfortunately, no such trap door exists today.

To the left of the barber shop stood St. Dunstan-In-The-West Church, its catacombs, vestry and courtyard connecting directly to Sweeney Todd’s shop,.  This structure still stands, imposing and impressive even today among the mix of old and new architecture along the street.  In the story, the Demon Barber would do away with his victims in the cellar of his shop, drop the bodies via his trick barber’s chair through a trap door and, with the help of Lovett, transport the “fresh meat” to her pie shop in nearby Bell Yard using the abandoned underground passages and catacombs below St. Dunstan’s.  Access to the catacombs is now restricted, so there’s no way to know how many of them still exist, but it’s nevertheless interesting to note just how close the entrance to those tunnels are to the shop’s back door.

Real or not, the ghost of Sweeney Todd still walks the dark alleys of the imagination of many, waiting patiently for the precise moment to reach forward to open their minds and throats to his ongoing legacy of murder.