On 9 March 1966, Ronnie Kray walked into The Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road and shot George Cornell in the head. Cornell was drinking a light ale. The barmaid ducked. The jukebox stuck. Several people in the pub saw it happen, and not one of them agreed to testify. It took the police three years to bring a case to trial, and by then the Krays had become something else entirely — not just criminals but characters, East End folk heroes who looked after their own and kept the streets safe and threw legendary Christmas parties for the neighbourhood kids.

That version of the story is mostly nonsense, but it’s the version that stuck. The Krays ran protection rackets, committed armed robberies, and killed at least two people with their own hands. Reggie took a carving knife from the kitchen of The Carpenter’s Arms — a pub the twins had bought for their mother — and used it to murder Jack McVitie at a house party in Stoke Newington. These were violent men who ruled through fear. But the mythology runs on a different fuel: the sharp suits, the celebrity photographs, the boxing, the idea that there was a code. Ronnie understood branding before branding had a name. He cultivated the rumours because the rumours were good for business.

You’ll hear this mythology maintained in the pubs on this crawl, and that’s partly the point. The Blind Beggar has the Cornell story on its walls. The Carpenter’s Arms has a painted portrait of the twins. The Prospect of Whitby hangs a noose over the river terrace to remind you about Execution Dock, where pirates were hanged and left until three tides washed over them — Captain Kidd among them, in 1701. These places have learned that criminal history sells, and they’re not wrong. We did this crawl on a Saturday and every pub had someone telling a version of a story they’d heard from someone else who’d heard it from someone who might have been there.

The route runs east to west, from Whitechapel to the Old Bailey, and the crimes get older as you go. The Krays are 1960s. Judge Jeffreys — the Hanging Judge, caught disguised as a sailor in a Wapping pub in 1688 while trying to flee to Hamburg — is seventeenth century. The body snatchers who scouted victims in the pubs around Smithfield are 1830s. Execution Dock operated for over four hundred years. By the time you reach The Viaduct Tavern, you’re drinking above the cells of a debtors’ prison and across the street from the Central Criminal Court. Six pubs, and between them roughly five centuries of people doing terrible things to each other within walking distance of the Thames.

We tend to start around noon. The Wapping stretch between pubs two and four is the longest gap — take the Overground rather than walking unless you fancy a forty-minute riverside trudge. Eat somewhere around stop three or four; the Prospect of Whitby does decent food if you’re not in a rush. The whole thing takes four to five hours at a comfortable pace, and you’ll finish within sight of St Paul’s.