CRIMINAL BRITAIN: A Photographic History

Gang warfare, audacious bank heists, floral tributes for James Bulger, killing sprees and IRA bombs, the gallery uses photographs from Mirrorpix's impressive archive. It is a firsthand look at some of Britain's darkest moments. Because courtroom trials are never televised, the public must rely on the quaint tradition of courtroom sketches and newspaper reports, the one realm of crime journalism that has remained unchanged over the last century. When it comes to crime scenes, criminals and police procedure, our media is now being allowed increasingly intimate coverage with CCTV and bodycam footage. For most of the past century however it was the work of the press photographer that got us as close to the real crime as we could ever wish to get. The haunting quality of this gallery of pictures partly lies in what they leave to our worried imaginations. A crime scene with the victim covered up, the front of a house that holds dreadful secrets within. The face of a serial killer. We may never hear the voices of Dr Crippen, Dr Reginald Christie or John George Haigh. Instead we gaze at their photographs, searching for a hint of evil in their unremarkable faces. Here are Whitechapel streets, the murder scene of 41 year old Mary Ann Nichols, a prostitute who was Jack the Ripper's first victim and every other one of his victims, captured here in nostalgic photographs, and some of the tatty old houses long since demolished. We see macabre scenes such as police digging for bodies at No. 10 Rillington Place and removing furniture for forensic examination. Members of the general public, little boys in particular, climb the fence to look over as detectives search for remains and clues at the scene of the Acid Bath Murders. See scenes from the search and digging on Saddleworth Moor in October 1965 looking for victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and a poignant picture of the mother of Lesley Ann Downey looking on. Angry crowds greet the murderers outside the court in Manchester and a worried but good looking young Ian Brady is taken away in a police car in May 1966, his image captured through the window. There is the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe case, searching the garden at 23 Cranley Gardens home of serial killer Dennis Nilsen, a picture of the bathroom where he butchered and dismembered the bodies of his victims and the actual tie he used to strangle his victims. Rosemary and Fred West and their notorious basement is pictured, Dr Harold Shipman's surgery in Hyde, Dr Hawley Crippen extradited back to Britain from Canada in August 1910 following the murder of his wife, caught on camera as he boards the ship, and his accomplice and lover Ethel Neave in the dock at the Old Bailey in October 1910. Fully illus, 144pp, 17 x 19cm.