In 2015 a building on Cable Street in east London was given planning permission as a women's history museum. When the doors opened it turned out to be the Jack the Ripper Museum, devoted to a serial killer of women. Local feminists and historians who had supported the original idea were furious. Within months the East End Women's Museum was launched as a positive counter-protest: a pop-up, online and physical, dedicated to the actual women of east London past and present. It remains the only museum in England explicitly devoted to women's history. It still does not have a permanent building. It has somehow become one of the more interesting museums in the country anyway.
The story of how the East End Women's Museum came into being is unusual enough to repeat carefully. In 2014 the developer behind 12 Cable Street in Tower Hamlets had applied for planning permission for a museum to celebrate the women of east London. Local women's organisations welcomed the project. When the museum opened in August 2015, it had become the Jack the Ripper Museum, themed around the Whitechapel murders of the 1880s and the prostitutes killed in them. The developer claimed the change was a creative decision; campaigners called it a bait-and-switch. Within weeks a group of feminist historians, museum professionals, and activists had decided to build the museum the original application had described. They had no building, no money, and no permanent collection. What they had was the certainty that east London women's history deserved better than to be reduced to murder victims.
The museum's mission is to research, record, share, and celebrate the stories of east London women, past and present. Its working definition is deliberately wide: it includes women of colour, women with disabilities, lesbian and bisexual women, trans women, working-class women, older women, women from migrant or itinerant communities, women who are refugees or seeking asylum, and women working in the sex industry. That last group matters here. Sex workers in Whitechapel were the victims at the centre of the Jack the Ripper Museum's tourism. The East End Women's Museum starts from the position that they were people - with names, families, and stories that had nothing to do with how they died.
East London produced more than its share of women whose work changed the country. Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 is often called the founding text of modern feminism, spent her early childhood at Barking. The matchgirls' strike of 1888 at the Bryant and May factory in Bow, led mostly by teenage girls poisoned by phosphorus, was one of the first successful strikes by unskilled workers in British history. The Ford Dagenham sewing machinists' strike of 1968, where 187 women walked out demanding pay equal to male workers, led directly to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. When Sylvia Pankhurst was expelled from the Women's Social and Political Union in 1912 for being too left-wing, she founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes from her base in Bow. Annie Clara Huggett, the last surviving British suffragette, lived locally and has a women's centre in Dagenham named for her.
Without a building, the museum has operated through partnerships and pop-ups across east London. East End Women: The Real Story ran from 2016 to 2017, funded by 38 Degrees, celebrating women's leadership in social and political change. Women at Watney, run in 2017 with King's College and University College London, captured women's memories of the East End market through recorded interviews. In 2018 The Women's Hall, partnered with Tower Hamlets Local History Library, explored the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes; Making Her Mark, partnered with Hackney Museum, told a hundred years of women's activism in Hackney. The EEWM Heritage Trail of 2020 lets people walk fourteen east London locations linked to women like Annie Brewster, a Caribbean-born nurse who worked at the London Hospital from the 1880s and was known among patients as 'Nurse Ophthalmic'.
In 2020 a construction site went up in Barking town centre that was supposed to become the museum's first permanent location. The lease negotiations did not finalise. In February 2023 the museum announced that it had cancelled the plans for a permanent home there. The pop-up model continues. Online exhibitions, community workshops, walking tours, and partnerships with local archives and universities are now the museum's principal form. Some would say a women's museum without a building is fragile; the museum's organisers would say a museum that fits inside the communities it serves rather than asking them to travel to it is doing exactly what a public history institution should. It is still, ten years after the Cable Street incident, the only dedicated women's museum in England.
The East End Women's Museum operates across east London with a focus around Barking, at roughly 51.53 degrees N, 0.08 degrees E. London City Airport (EGLC) lies about 5 km southwest. Stansted (EGSS) is roughly 30 km north. The museum itself is virtual and pop-up; what is visible from the air is the wider east London landscape it documents, from the East End proper through Stepney and Bow out to Barking and Dagenham.