Jack the Ripper museum opens despite prior plans for women's history exhibits

LONDON, July 31 (UPI) -- A new museum has opened in London's East End and it isn't what many expected.

Instead of a local women's history museum, former Google executive Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe built one dedicated to Jack the Ripper's crimes instead. The doors are scheduled to open next week.

"We did plan to do a museum about social history of women but as the project developed we decided a more interesting angle was from the perspective of the victims of Jack the Ripper," Palmer-Edgecumbe explained to the London Evening Standard.

"It is absolutely not celebrating the crime of Jack the Ripper but looking at why and how the women go in that situation in the first place."

Locals have responded with anger to the change of plans, reportedly claiming it a misogynistic turn of events.

An expert on the infamous serial killer, Russell Edwards, is against the museum, Telegraph reports. "What the museum does is perpetuate the myth of Jack the Ripper," he said. "That masks the fact that five women were butchered by a serial killer."

"Is it really doing the public good?" he continued. "Especially considering they set up a museum to highlight the women in Whitechapel at the time, which is by far the more important thing."