I often arrive at work feeling anxious, and it only recently struck me, after making the journey a mere two or three thousand times, that perhaps this is because my route, short though it is at two and a half miles, is steeped in violence. The quantity of bloodshed, some of it safely historical, some of it only lately spilt, through which I pass, wade might be a better verb, is truly extraordinary.

That said, nothing much happens for the first 400 yards, although I do skirt the bush in which a dismembered corpse was found in a suitcase a few years ago. A disgruntled tenant had done in his landlord in Brixton, a good few miles away, and then, for reasons best known to himself, dumped the evidence practically on my doorstep.

Next, as Broadway Market crosses the Regent’s Canal, comes the bridge from which the Krays reputedly chucked the gun Reggie had fired at Jack “the Hat” McVitie before stabbing him one night in October 1967. Another few hundred yards and we’re at the site on the Hackney Road where a young man tried to blow up the number 26 bus, and himself with it, on July 21, 2005.

Down past the bakery on Durant Street, the smell of fresh croissants sits oddly with the knowledge that in the summer this area was taped off for weeks as the police investigated the fatal stabbing of 21-year-old Dylan Fox on July 7, 2008.

Arriving at Bethnal Green Road, one mile travelled, and not far off to the west is the top of Brick Lane, where in the Seventies and Eighties the National Front, and then the BNP, would peddle their nonsense and periodically clash with local Bengali youths or anti-Nazi protesters or both. A few hundred yards east is Bethnal Green Tube, where on March 3, 1943, 173 people were crushed to death while hurrying into the station during an air raid.

A few yards beyond the junction, on Vallance Road, Ronnie and Reggie resurface at the site of their childhood home. Bethnal Green Road was also the main thoroughfare for the twins’ lavishly camp funeral corteges in March 1995 and October 2000.

A little further south is the scene of one of the worst single losses of life of the Second World War, when a V2 rocket, a doodle-bug, hit Hughes Mansions on March 27, 1945, killing 134 people, 120 of them Jewish. At a memorial service 60 years later, relatives of the dead were pelted with eggs by local Asian youths.

Just beyond that, a short way up Cheshire Street, is the Repton Boys boxing club, still going strong after 124 years, the place where, among others, Audley Harrison and John H. Stracey learnt their trade. Boxing may be legitimised violence, but it is violence nonetheless.

Just before Vallance Road meets the Whitechapel Road, off to the east, is Durward Street. Formerly called Buck’s Row, it was here on August 31, 1888, that the mutilated body of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols was discovered, the first victim of the serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper.

Also to the east, 200 yards up the Whitechapel Road – it’s those twins again – is the Blind Beggar pub, where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell on March 9, 1966. Cornell had called him a “fat poof” during an altercation the previous Christmas.

Just beyond the Blind Beggar is Sidney Street. Here, at number 100, in January 1911, three Latvian revolutionaries who had tried to rob a jeweller’s shop and killed two policemen, were tracked down and surrounded. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary of the day, could not resist turning up to view the fun in person, thus gaining a reputation for trigger-happiness that helped undermine his warnings over German rearmament a quarter of a century later.

Next to Sidney Street is Jubilee Street, where at number 77 in April 1907, a “Mr Ivanovich” lodged while attending the 5th congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. Mr Ivanovich subsequently became known to the world as Joe Stalin. The more famous delegates, Lenin among them, lodged in middle-class Bloomsbury.

Still at the junction, looking west now, is Aldgate East Tube, where eight people died in one of the bombings on July 7, 2005. Straight ahead is the Royal London Hospital, where many of the injured were treated.

Across the lights and down Cannon Street Road, we come to Cable Street, where on October 4, 1936, in what was soon named the Battle of Cable Street, an assortment of anti-Fascists erected roadblocks and prevented Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts from marching into the Jewish East End.

Swinging south to the Highway, we pass the site of the lawless Ratcliffe Rookery, one of the most dangerous places in London in Victorian times. Turning into Pennington Street is the spot where, 22 years ago, the picket lines were drawn up outside what was then called “Fortress Wapping”.

Phew. It’s no wonder I arrive in a bit of a state, is it?

robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk