When the murderer died he had a stake driven through his heart

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If you know where to look, London's streets are filled with traces of the lost past. Peering through drain covers, basements, windows, and walking down old alleys, opens up a world of forgotten history. In some cases that history has been deliberately hidden in an attempt to cover over the terrible bloody deeds associated with it.

Such is the case with one central London road which has had its past horrors obliterated from the map. The Highway is today a busy thoroughfare running eastwards from just north of the Tower of London and then just north of the old docks at Shadwell basin. Today it's got all the trappings of modern London alongside it - a McDonald's, Wapping Supermarket and Domino's Pizza.

But as Richard Guard describes in his excellent little book "Lost London", The road dates back almost 2,000 years and was originally built by the Romans. It once connected the city to the lost village of Ratcliffe which later became swallowed up by the city and docks.

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Because it was so near the docks, the highway gained terrible reputation for drunken sailors, crime and prostitution - much like a lot of London back in the day in fact. By 1850 it was described as the " Regent Street of Seamen" by writer William Thornbury. It had lots of shops even selling obscure things like wild animals and apparently it was not unusual to see lions and pelicans as you walked along it. Once a tiger escaped and grabbed a small boy in its jaws. A man tried to free the boy but by beating the tiger only succeeded in killing the boy.

One Victorian writer described the filth of the street as follows: "Ratcliffe-Highway, the headquarters of unbridled vice and drunken violence-of all that is dirty, disorderly, and debased. Splash, dash, down comes the rain; but it must fall a deluge indeed to wash away even a portion of the filth to be found in this detestable place."

But the road really hit the headlines when, one day, Margaret Jewell, a housemaid, returned home from buying oysters for the shop she worked at. She tried to open the door at 29 Ratcliffe Highway but could not get in. When the door was finally forced, the bodies of a family including s Timothy Marr, his wife and their baby as well as a shop assistant were found inside. They'd been brutally battered to death with a pointed shipwright's hammer.

The population of the street was plunged into panic but just 12 days later the landlord at the nearby King's arms pub, his wife and the barmaid all had their throats cut. An apprentice called John Turner only escaped by locking himself in his bedroom and climbing out the window using his bed sheets as a rope.

Peter Cunningham described the panic in his 1850 Handbook of London: "Many of our readers can remember the state of London just after the murders of Marr and Williamson - the terror which was on every face, the careful barring of doors, the providing of blunderbusses (early guns) and watchmen's rattles.

We know of a shopkeeper who on that occasion sold three hundred rattles in about ten hours."

Eventually a man called Williams was arrested for the crimes - he had been a friend of Timothy Marr's. But his dastardly crimes were enough to make Ratcliffe Highway notorious.

The road's name was changed twice to try to blot out its grizzly past. Once to St George's Street and then in 1937 to The Highway.

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