London — A new museum dedicated to Jack the Ripper in the neighborhood he once stalked is the subject of a dust-up here — largely because the museum billed itself as a “world-class” women’s history museum when applying to officials for planning approval.

Last summer Waugh Thistleton, the architecture firm hired by the former Google executive Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, applied to the Tower Hamlets Council for permission to open a museum celebrating the women of the East End, one of London’s most historically troubled districts.

The application calls the center the first women’s museum in Britain, and says it will “retell the history of the East End,” which, it adds, “is usually told from the perspective of poverty, crime and social unrest.” (The now-thriving East End was a hotbed of crime until the 1990s.) The council granted permission for the site’s use as a museum last fall.

Local residents realized they had gotten a different type of museum altogether when, last month, the site’s facade was revealed, announcing the Jack the Ripper Museum, dedicated to the man who murdered at least five women in the late 1880s in East London and whose identity remains unknown.

Reached by email, Palmer-Edgecumbe said that he was “very saddened by the reaction to the museum and I believe that this is due to a misconception to what we are trying to do.” He added, “Our museum is a serious examination of the events of East End in the 1880s not a glorification of Jack the Ripper or his crimes.”

A statement on the museum’s website echoes language from the original planning application, saying that the institution “takes a look at the history of women in the East End in the Victorian era and discusses why so many women had little choice in their lives other than to turn to prostitution.” The victims of the murders traditionally attributed to Jack the Ripper were all prostitutes.

But the website also includes the history of Jack the Ripper, and the museum has tweeted several times about “Ripperology,” which one of the tweets calls “the study of the infamous serial killer.”

In a phone interview, Andrew Waugh, a director of Waugh Thistleton, the architects who prepared the original plan, said that the firm was unaware of the plans to change the museum’s purpose. He said that he had worked with Palmer-Edgecumbe before submitting the application last summer, and that he had visited the site with him several times. He noted that as early as last summer, a resident had contacted the Tower Hamlets Council, expressing concern that the museum would be turned into a Jack the Ripper site. But Palmer-Edgecumbe did not respond to Waugh Thistleton’s attempts to contact him about the resident’s claim, according to Waugh.

Of a Jack the Ripper museum, Waugh said: “It’s salacious, misogynist rubbish. We’re not interested in it.”

Palmer-Edgecumbe said that the project had “changed architects in September 2014” and that to his knowledge Waugh had not tried to reach him since then. He confirmed that Waugh Thistleton did not know that the museum would be used as a Jack the Ripper museum when it applied to the Council.

In a statement on its website, the Tower Hamlets Council said that it was “aware of the Jack the Ripper imagery and is investigating the extent to which unauthorized works may have been carried out at the premises.”