Artist: Jim Baldry
Author: traditional
Label: Caedmon
Year: 1953

BBC recording released on lp Sailorman And Servingmaids (The Folksongs of Britain Vol 6) in '61. Roud #598. About an East London Highway in Stepney, infamous for a series of murders in 1811. It's on the traject of the London Marathon twice. Real Highway To Hell.

Early 19th Century Ratcliffe Highway was known as the toughest thoroughfare of the East End. Three examples: Right in front of St-George-in-the-East church lived the first family massacred by John William, who became a serial killer the moment he repeated his bloody action ten days later a couple of blocks away. He got cought, lynched and showed around in triumph, on an open cart surrounded by his murder weapons and the wooden stake the mob would plunge through his chest the moment he was burried in unholy ground near the scene of his crimes.
Second quote, from Peter Ackroyd's book Hawksmoor: Here all corruption and infection had its centre. In Argell Rents, next the Ratcliffe Highway, Mr. Barwick was killed barbarously, his throat being cut, the right side of his head open'd and his skull broke. The murtherer was afterwards hang'd in chains near the place of his crime - thus it is call'd Red Cliff, or Ratcliffe, the hanging dock opposite my church where the bodies of the damned are washed by the water until they fall to bits from the effects of time.
Finally, Thomas de Quincy in 1827 louded the Ratcliffe Highway murders as the most superb of the century by many degrees.