Canning Town is the birthplace of Danny Dyer, and it's also London’s most rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. Our pints correspondent went there for a few scoops.
The Beckton Arms doesn’t really want you to know it’s there. There’s no trace of the Canning Town pub on Google Maps. They don’t have any official social media. Its squat exterior is hidden from the A13 road that borders it by a parade of spiked palisades. You only really notice the pub if you come via the north, down a quiet backstreet away from the bustle of Barking Road – and even then, not until you’re virtually right outside it. All of this is to say, you’ve really got to go out of your way to end up in the Beckton Arms.
The pub’s dies ater came on December 5th 1999 when, just as the winter sun began to set, two masked men walked into the pub and executed Tommy Hole and Joey ‘The Crow’ Evans, two career criminals embedded in the London underworld. As the pair were settling in to watch Liverpool play Sheffield Wednesday, the masked men shot Hole twice in the back of the head at point-blank range, before firing four shots into a fleeing Evans’ torso. The killers calmly left the Beckton and were never found.
I’d come to the pub on the first Friday of 2025 – one of those louring, bleakly cold winter days which make you feel like spring’s an eternity away – to immerse myself in a part of the capital that’s changed rapidly over the past 15 years. As the east London locale’s most infamous drinking establishment, the Beckton Arms – confusingly not in Beckton itself – seemed as good a place as any to start. Which is how I’d ended up quaffing a very reasonably priced pint of Euroslop as dusk fell, sat uncomfortably next to a non-verbal septuagenarian couple playing games on their mobile phones, at a volume usually reserved for unruly toddlers or teenagers at the back of the bus.
Canning Town lies just to the east of Canary Wharf, where the River Lea makes its confluence with the Thames. The area really came of age in the mid-1800s when the Royal Victoria Docks was built. By 1911, the Newham neighbourhood had over 300,000 people living in it, often in pretty dreadful, unsanitary conditions. Most of these cramped terraces were torn down in the slum clearances of the 1930s – or destroyed by the Luftwaffe a few years later. New estates were built following the Second World War, but in 1981 the Royal Victoria Docks, cuckolded by the containerisation of cargo ships and the docks down river at Tilbury, shut, heralding E16’s slow decline from the 1980s up to the new millennium.
It’s an area that’s worn many different hats over its existence. There was Canning Town, the aforementioned dockers’ slum; Canning Town, the bastion of left-wing ideals (Keir Hardie was once its MP); Canning Town, the footballing hotbed (West Ham United were founded here as Thames Ironworks FC); Canning Town, the pugilist paradiso; Canning Town, the National Front stronghold; Cockney Canning Town; West African Canning Town; Russian Canning Town; Muslim Canning Town. There’s the nightclubbing Canning Town of FOLD and Pier One. And, of course, there’s Canning Town, cradle of London’s crime underworld.
The big hits used to play out in its now-lost pubs. The Ordnance Arms shut in 2012 after a customer attacked the landlord for refusing to serve him his 31st beer of the evening. The Anchor went in 2001 following the murder of a pool-playing customer, gruesomely stabbed in the rectum as he bent over to make a shot. The Durham Arms, once a gun dealing hotspot, closed despite police in 1994 botching an undercover sting operation by placing hidden microphones slightly too near the jukebox, rendering all recordings indecipherable.
But no matter the iteration of Canning Town, it has been something of a societal afterthought; consistently underfunded, underdeveloped or forgotten about altogether. Until recently.
In 2012, as part of the wider Olympic legacy to transform Newham, the £3.7bn regeneration of Canning Town and Custom House began. The works, led by developers Bouygues, promised 10,000 new homes and a new town centre containing shops, restaurants, and health facilities in the area opposite Canning Town station. The old terraces and estates were (or are about to be) demolished, with shiny new high-density high-rises – essentially an entire new town in the sky – built in their place. And although a proportion of these are classed as affordable, many have been sold off to young professionals and wealthy out-of-towners. It’s a city of two halves; a microcosm of New London. How has this influx of private owners and international students affected the balance of Canning Town? To find out, like I’ve done countless times before, I decided to stare deep into the bottom of a pint glass, with a boozy odyssey through Canning Town’s public houses.
I began my day with a stomach-lining lunch at BJ’s, the erotically monikered pie and mash shop located on the Plaistow portion of Barking Road. The owner, a man named Nathan so archetypally cockney he was probably birthed in St Mary-le-Bow’s vestry itself, welcomed me in like an old friend, and made sure I knew that you’re supposed to gobble it up with a spoon rather than a knife. There’s been a lot written recently about the fading fortunes of this most East End of dining traditions, but it is peculiar how, in a world where working-class cafés and pubs have been fetishised and reimagined for a new generation, the humble pie and mash shop hasn’t quite been able to capture the minds of freelance art directors who wrap their scarves around their heads. It does, however, remain a very tasty, very quick, and very cheap lunch.
As I tucked into a heavily vinegared one and one, a young woman came in. Her mother, it turned out, is an old acquaintance of Nathan’s, and soon enough the gossip mill churned as she awaited her takeaway. Like the best pubs, the pie and mash shop is an endangered community third space: no one else came into the shop during the 30 minutes I was inside, and when I tried to go back a few weeks later, the shop was closed.
I left BJ’s and, having suffered through two acrid pints of continental lager at the Red House – a spartan, musty boozer devoid of customers – I arrived moderately tipsy at the Beckton Arms.
Today, the pub maintains just a soupçon of jeopardy – it’s cash-only, and admittedly there is what appears to be an old bullet hole pointing ominously at your left temple when you use the urinal – but really it has become, like so many of London’s once ‘dodgy’ boozers, a boisterous locals’ hub where the drinks are cheap and the chatter cacophonous. At 5pm, there was a steady mélange of old boys and mums trying to catch up as their kids milled about. ‘Quiet’, the amiable barmaid told me when I asked her how her day had been. ‘But it’ll get busier later on’. I thought about pressing her further: about the megalopolis rising on her doorstep, about business, about that afternoon 26 years ago, but, conscious that to her I probably looked like an undercover police officer – or worse, a journalist – I thought better of it and sat down with another pint and the sounds of Candy Crush Saga ringing in my ears.
It’s heartening to know that places like this, so obviously just for one, tight-knit community, still exist in a content-churn world of guides, maps, and hidden gems. Yes, the Beckton Arms doesn’t really want you to know it’s there, but maybe that’s okay. Some things are better left unspoilt.
I drank up, and walked further down the Barking Road. Crossing underneath the A13 today feels like stepping into a new world. This is Canning Town, the future; a second-rate Shanghai of cuboid juts in varying shades of beige, with only great hulking pylons and the distant IFS Cloud Cable Cars breaking the glass and steel skyline. There’s a microbrewery, a wine bar, a Starbucks, an Asian supermarket, an artisan bakery, five hotels and a hell of a lot of unfinished building work. You get the sense that this could be anywhere in London that’s been newly developed, from Tottenham Hale to North Acton to Nine Elms: locales united by the creeping suspicion that no one’s really living there; entire cities constructed as artist’s impressions for some Knight Frank catalogue.
This part of Canning Town has been christened by developers the ‘Hallsville Quarter’, and consists of a sizable amount of retail and leisure space, plus 1,100 new homes. As a paltry 97 of these are to be social rent homes, the majority of new residents will have to be relatively wealthy – city workers, those priced out of trendier parts of east London, and the scions of the international class coming over to study. I ended the afternoon in the only pub in the area: Streeties. It’s a backstreet anomaly set against the high-rises, and lies ominously close to the next phase of development, the Canning Town Estate, whose residents voted ‘yes’ last year to the demolition of their homes.
Streeties remains the last bastion of Old Canning Town in the Quarter. The slim, one-bar boozer has all the hallmarks of a proper, uproarious east London establishment: the pool table by the bogs; the 1970s carpet; the all-white paint job still faintly sniffing of fresh Dulux. Then there’s the African grey parrot, Trevor, squawking blissfully away in the corner. Run expertly by the convivial Marina, the pub often doubles as an after-work watering hole for the labourers of the Hallsville Quarter, just as it would have done back when this was the land of the dockers.
That sparkle of end-of-the-working-week possibility was palpable as we entered, with the pub full of locals hooning themselves on pints, watching the football, and seriously considering a cheeky round of brandies. Despite a vibe more welcoming than most pubs west of Poplar, Marina told me that the pub was merely ‘ticking over’, although she seemed nonplussed about the new developments on her doorstep. ‘A couple of them have come in before,’ Marina said when I asked if any of the new residents had patronised Streeties yet. ‘But they’ve told me it’s a choice between having a few drinks, or going out for dinner, and that’s even with our prices’. At £5 for the premium lager, the pub remains one of the cheapest in the city, and so I duly spent the rest of the evening getting sozzled at Streeties, with any hopes of interviewing the regulars soon lost in a fog of Stella and cigarette smoke.
For now, Canning Town’s two halves uneasily coexist. The final phase of redevelopment is scheduled to finish at the start of 2026, with the refurbishment of Canning Town Old Library on Barking Road. But really, will it ever end? Barratt Homes have already submitted plans for a new, 30-storey development to the north of the A13 called Crown Wharf. In 100 years, who knows what will still be standing in the Hallsville Quarter.
Canning Town is London at warp speed. The city is the ultimate palimpsest, and has since time immemorial pushed old residents out and invited new ones in. When this version of Canning Town is finally complete, will there still be a place for somewhere like Streeties, or the Beckton Arms? If even the urbane newcomers can’t afford a night down the pub, what hope do the pintmen and women of E16 have? Maybe it was always leading up to this point: there were once 15 pubs in the Hallsville Quarter, with seven closing since 2000 alone. For now, though, Streeties beats on alone against the open sluice of modernity, merrily carousing as the world turns.
