Bacchus, 177 Hoxton Street, N1

“Turn into Hoxton Street and walk north, leaving behind the wine bars and jazz clubs to enter the real old Hoxton, and the busy street market.”, I wrote in 2003, about Bacchus “...a quiet little local in the middle of Hoxton street market, which has changed little since it stood in for Whitechapel’s ‘Blind Beggar’ in The Krays”. I should have known better.

This is Hoxton, and gentrification runs amok. This little boozer is now high-style cutting-edge restaurant Bacchus. So it’s changed a lot since appearing as the ‘Blind Beggar’, where George Cornell (Steven Berkoff) is gunned down (after he, rather recklessly, refers to the psychopathically violent gangster in public as a “fat poof”) in Peter Medak’s Sixties-set The Krays. Philip Ridley’s script, arch poetics aside, depicts a very different East End from that usually seen on screen – a fiercely matriarchal society where women shoulder the burdens while overgrown boys play gangsters.

The real Blind Beggar, where Ronnie Kray had grown cocky enough to pop George Cornell in a pub full of witnesses in 1966, much changed and spruced up, can be seen at 337 Whitechapel Road in Whitechapel.

Trivia: In the mid-Sixties, the owner of the Blind Beggar had the radical notion of playing pop records in the bar, and gave birth to the pub discotheque trend.

The Krays (1990, dir: Peter Medak)