An enjoyable book reveals the gory history of the murders that covered north London in blood, writes Lew Matthews

ON DECEMBER 18, 1914, newly-married Peggy Lofty died mysteriously in the bathtub of a house in Bismarck Road, now called Waterlow Road, just off Highgate Hill.
It would probably have been deemed to have been an accident, but a short report of the incident appeared in the News of the World – where it was seen by relatives of another woman who had died equally mysteriously some years before, and they smelled a rat.
That was the beginning of the downfall of George Joseph Smith, one of England’s most notorious serial killers, later to be known as the ‘Brides in the Bath’ murderer, who was finally hanged for his crimes in 1915.

The world has changed but there is still a role for Black Power, film-maker Horace Ove tells Kim Janssen

FILM-MAKER Horace Ove, who is being honoured with a major retrospective from today (Thursday) at the Barbican, boasts at least two major firsts in his long and illustrious career.
The better-known of the two is that he was the first black British film-maker to direct a feature-length movie; the second, less well-known, is that he opened Camden Town’s first boutique in the early 1970s.
Ove, a youthful 66-year-old Trinidadian, laughs as he explains: “It was called Du Du Boutique and it was in Parkway; me and my wife had all the hip clothes before the market or any other shops moved in.
“I had some hippy friends who decorated the shop and they painted the outside with a giant dick!”
No stranger to controversy, Ove’s first film, Pressure, was banned for two years by its own backers, the British Film Institute (BFI).