SOME THIRTY YEARS since Ronnie Kray died on 17 March 1995, it feels like everywhere in Hackney claims a spurious connection to him and his twin brother Reggie, even though the two gangsters are more typically associated with the East End. But one place which can truly make this claim is the basement flat of 9 Evering Road, in Stoke Newington. It was here, on 20 October 1967, that Reggie Kray shot Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie in the face as Ronnie looked on.
McVitie was an associate of the Krays, who had been to the Regency Club, at 240a Amhurst Road in Stoke Newington, a few days earlier, waving around a sawn-off shotgun. The establishment was ‘Kray-protected’, and so they gave him a warning. But a few days later he returned to the club, threatening Ronnie and Reggie in their absence. When the Krays heard of this, they had McVitie driven to Evering Road, where they were attending a drinks party.
There, Ronnie writes in My Story, his autobiography, “[McVitie] went for Reggie and Reggie done him in self-defence … McVitie deserved it, he was a bad man.” Of course, the official account differs. But it was this murder – alongside Ronnie killing George Cornell at the Blind Beggar in Bethnal Green – that led to their eventual trial and imprisonment on life sentences in 1969.
Some 36 years before their criminal careers ended behind bars, the twins were born at 68 Stean Street – across the road from what is now the Haggerston overground station – on 24 October 1933. Ronnie writes that “Reggie was born at eight in the morning and I was born 10 minutes later. We were identical twins except for a mole below the collar line on my neck. It was the only way you could tell us apart.”
But this connection to Hackney was short-lived, as they moved to Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, in 1938. Occasionally, in their youth, they would rock up in Hackney. In 1949, aged 16, they got into a scrap outside the music hall on Mare Street – now the Hackney Empire – and were charged with GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) and tried at the Old Bailey. Luckily for them, their priest-cum-boxing coach, the Reverend Hetherington, intervened and testified to their good character, so they were let off.
As their ‘business’ steadily grew, both twins spent time in prison, Ronnie was certified ‘insane’, and they eventually ended up living in Hackney in 1962. They moved into separate flats in Cedra Court, on Cazenove Road, where Ronnie threw the infamous sex parties that led to a political scandal: The Boothby Affair.
Ronnie had met Lord Boothby, a Tory peer, when they both invested in a housing development in Enugu, Nigeria, to diversify their assets. Soon after, Ronnie started procuring young men from the East End for orgies he threw for Boothby at Cedra Court.
Daniel Smith, who wrote The Peer and the Gangster: A Very British Cover-Up about the scandal, said that – in spite of what the Sunday Mirror reported at the time – Ronnie and Boothby were “not each other’s type; basically, Boothby was an old man, and they both liked young, pretty boys.” Attempts to cover up the story led to the Mirror paying £40,000 in damages to Boothby, but nothing to Ronnie, who later wrote: “The only good thing about it as far as I was concerned was that people knew about my bisexuality.”
Smith, reflecting on this, said that “Ron liked to be around famous, important people, and one wonders if they hadn’t had that desire to be seen with the rich and powerful then they might have been more successful in their criminal enterprise.”
Beyond this, however, attempts to link the Krays with Hackney can be overdone. Amir Dotan, a local historian in Stoke Newington, said that attempts to link the twins with local pubs, clubs and restaurants are “getting silly at this point”. Some “dozen pubs” in N16 alone make these claims, even though Dotan only knows of one pub where the Krays frequented: The Coach and Horses on Stoke Newington High Street. Other than that, most of their haunts were in the East End.
Following the murders of McVitie and Cornell, the twins ended up in jail. They were arrested on 8 May 1968, and the longest murder hearing in British criminal history ensued. The judge deemed their sentences “should not be less than thirty years”. Reggie moved between prisons whilst Ronnie ended up in Broadmoor in 1979, with fellow inmates Peter Sutcliffe and Charles Bronson.
Ronnie died on 17 March 1995, and a few weeks later, a grand funeral was held. A hearse, pulled by six black horses, followed by 26 limousines, led a procession from St Matthew’s Church in Bethnal Green to Chingford Mount. Some 60,000 people were rumoured to be in attendance. But when Reggie died five years later, on 1 October 2000, it was a much quieter affair.
Thirty years on from Ronnie’s death, their presence in Hackney and the East End is just as loud as it was back in the 90s. Daniel Smith finds this strange: he is “surprised they’ve got [such a] legacy” because “the really successful criminals are the ones you’ve never heard of”. But as Ronnie himself wrote in 1992, “it was all a long time ago. But people still remember us, don’t they?” And in 2025, those words are just as true.
Cosmo Adair is a postgraduate journalism student at City, University of London. He writes about Haggerston and very little else.