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.
