A couple of months ago I visited The Blind Beggar pub with my friend Nick. The pub of course is notorious, certainly not because of its beer, decor or food these days but because it’s where Ronnie Kray shot fellow villain George Cornell right between the eyes with a 9mm Mauser in 1966. It is said, and I do hope it’s true, that one of Kray’s bullets richocheted and hit the juke box, which was playing the number one record at the time by The Walker Brothers and the record started jumping on the line The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More..Any More..Any More..Any More… It was said that George, big and brave admittedly, was not the most intelligent of men, and had called Ronnie ‘a big fat poof’. Ronnie obviously took exception to this, though not for being called a ‘poof’ apparently, but because he was ‘big and fat’ – quite 21st Century of Ronnie really.
On the other side of the Whitechapel Road from the Blind Beggar is the horribly named LHT Urban bar which used to be called The London Hospital Tavern (named because it’s next to the London Hospital which incidentally was where the Elephant Man lived for a short while and if you ask nicely you can see a plaster cast of his body). 
It was here in the early 60s that the biggest gang fight for decades occurred, featuring the Kray Twins and their “Firm” and the fantastically named “Watney Streeters”. The Kray’s Firm easily won and their reign of the East End of London began.
I’m not sure, but I suspect, that the Krays might have felt slightly uncomfortable with the current imaginative exterior decor and they may have taken their fight elsewhere. Don’t you need planning permission to paint the outside of your pub like this? If so, shouldn’t the planning officers be shot? Perhaps between the eyes.
