Dennis Severs began life in California but escaped to London five days after graduating from high school in 1967. A dozen years later, he bought a derelict house in Spitalfields, the market area in the East End where Jack carved his victims, and re-imagined the house as one lived in by a Huguenot family of weavers from the late 18th to early 20th centuries.

It’s dark inside; the home’s 10 rooms on four floors are dimly lit only by a few flickering candles in rooms with small leaded windows sometimes partially covered with drawn curtains. The eat-in kitchen and a drawing room on the first floor are like the rest of the rooms: so chock full of furniture, fabrics, plates, fireplaces with mantels overflowing with china and herb pots and family mementos, decaying wallpaper, wood-burning fireplaces scenting the rooms with smoke and from the vegetables and fruits slowly roasting over the flames.

You are forbidden to talk in the house — we whisper occasionally — and no photos are allowed — Cynthia cheats, as you can see. Severs’s recreation is not accurate: Every room is a hodgepodge of artifacts from different eras. But he was neither interested nor trying to be accurate. He wants us to feel what it was like to live in those times. If you can suspend disbelief and open all your senses, he succeeds. It’s well worth the visit.

We depart and ambulate to the Ten Bells Tavern, which seemed to serve as ground zero for Jack’s victims, right next to austere Christ Church, whose front door looks down a street where Jack found a few, and whose narrow, dark side street also gave him cover for taking another life.

We walk through the Spitalfields market, whose entrance is marked by a white goat on a tower. It’s busy. Did we say busy? The market has two sides — the old and the new — but they are similar: hundreds of stalls selling clothing, jewelry, art of all kinds, and food of every nation on the planet to a tidal sea, a constant ebb and flood, of walking, gawking, munching, shouting, shopping, snogging, hugging, swilling, totally happy people who apparently have NO concept of personal space. It’s great. Exciting. Happening. Cynthia gets a hot chocolate and, being in a chocolatey mood, we stroll up Brick Lane — taking in a colorful mix of street art and graffiti on many walls and bridges — to Dark Sugars Chocolate nirvana, which has wooden bowls with nuggets of chocolate made with gin, or limes, or chilis, or the usual assortment of ingredients Salvador Dali might think to put in a chocolate bon bon.

David stands outside watching a bevy of bohemian barely bound boobs bop by while every few seconds Cynthia runs out with a tiny nugget in her fingers and a twinkle in her eye, saying “This is soooo good. You gotta try this.” She’s right, of course, but we go easy on the sweets because we’re off to the Peruvian restaurant Pachamama, which advertises itself as serving traditional Peruvian dishes transmogrified by British ingredients. By British ingredients, the restaurant means any ingredient from any location someone from Britain has at any time set foot.

As at most restaurants we’ve been lucky enough to get reservations, we arrive on the early side, about 5:30 or six, and are one of the first tables seated. Within about 10 minutes, there’s not an empty table to be found and the decibel level is … exciting.