Inside ‘Britain’s roughest pub’ the place Ronnie Kray shot gangland rival

Time has stood still inside the notorious boozer where Ronnie Kray shot and killed George Cornell in March 1966.

Tower Hamlets, as a borough, has changed out of all recognition – with several street signs in Bengali to cater for the sizeable Asian population – but inside the Blind Beggar, it’s practically a museum exhibit of old London gangland.

Urban Explorer Wendall took a trip to the London’s East End to see if it really was as rough as many people seem to believe. He says that he didn’t find it as intimidating as Croydon, but found any talk of East Enders being warm and welcoming a bit of an exaggeration.

The Midlands-based YouTuber found that out when he was cornered by the landlord of one East End boozer: “He had a word with me in the loo, and he said that it wasn’t a good idea to film in there,” Wendall revealed.

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But, despite Wendall’s local guide describing it as “the roughest pub he’d ever visited,” it was an entirely different story in the Blind Beggar. The good-humoured Irish barman happily gave a mini-tour of the crime scene, saying that he’s called upon to tell the story “a couple of hundred times a week.”

As proof that the East End hasn’t entirely shed its criminal past, he added that a framed photo of Cornell lying dead at the corner of the bar had been pocketed by some light-fingered drinker.

There’s still plenty of evidence of the murder, though, with bullet-holes in the ceiling and one patch of ancient 1960s wallpaper preserved by a frame, showing the spot where the bullet that killed Cornell passed through his skull and embedded itself in the wall.

Ronnie himself was not a fan of the pub. In his 1988 book Our Story, he recalls that it was “…a big ugly building in a very poor part of London. Not the sort of place you’d want to take a lady friend for a quiet drink or a business contact to clinch a big deal.

“It was simply the kind of pub where the poor people in that part of London would go for a drink to drown their sorrows, to have a knees-up on Saturday nights and pretend they were feeling happy.”

Cornell had been having a quiet drink with a mate when Ronnie and Kray associate Ian Barrie walked in. Barrie fired a warning shot into the ceiling, to scatter the pub’s staff and customers, at which point Kray pulled out a Luger and shot his gangland rival twice, first in the shoulder and then just above his right eye.

Few were willing to testify against the gangland kingpin and it wasn’t until three years later that Kray was eventually tried for the crime at the Old Bailey. He, along with his brother, was sentenced to life imprisonment and he died in jail in March 1995, 29 years after the shooting.

Today, the Blind Beggar’s red leather couches are worn away by the feet of visitors standing on them to get a better view of where the fatal bullet struck the wall.

And despite the fact that almost 40% of the local population are Muslims, and therefore unlikely to pop into the pub, the historic boozer – which was also the birthplace of the Salvation Army – does a roaring trade thanks to curious tourists.

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