The Blind Beggar. It's an ordinary pub, still serving pints today, and two completely opposite pieces of history happened on this one spot. One founded a global charity. The other was a murder.
Start with the charity, because nobody expects it. In eighteen sixty-five, a preacher named William Booth stood on the pavement right outside this pub — a rough, poor, hard-drinking stretch of Whitechapel — and started preaching to the people everyone else had written off. The drunks, the destitute, the ones the respectable churches didn't want in the pews. He and his wife Catherine built it into a mission, and then, a few years later, they gave it a military structure and a new name: the Salvation Army. Ranks, uniforms, brass bands, a war on poverty run like an actual army. And people hated it at first — there was literally a mob called the Skeleton Army that attacked their marches. But it grew, and grew, and today the Salvation Army works in more than a hundred countries and helps millions of
people a year. One of the largest charitable organizations on the entire planet began as one furious man shouting the gospel at drunks on this pavement. On a Tuesday.
Then there's the other thing that happened here. In the nineteen sixties, the East End was run by two identical twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray. And the Krays are a genuinely strange story, because they wanted two things that don't g
