A "rookery" is a colloquial English term given in the 18th and 19th centuries to a city slum occupied by poor people and frequently also by criminals and prostitutes. Such areas were overcrowded, with low-quality housing and little or no sanitation. Poorly constructed dwellings, built with multiple storeys and often crammed into any area of open ground, created densely-populated areas of gloomy, narrow streets and alleyways.
Etymology
The term rookery originated because of the perceived similarities between a city slum and the nesting habits of the rook, a bird in the crow family. Rooks nest in large, noisy colonies consisting of multiple nests, often untidily crammed into a close group of treetops called a rookery. The word might also be linked to the slang expression to rook, a verb well established in the 16th century and associated with the supposedly thieving nature of the rook bird. The term was first used in print by the poetGeorge Galloway in 1792 to describe "a cluster of mean tenements densely populated by people of the lowest class".
Famous rookeries include the St Giles area of central London, which existed from the 17th century and into Victorian times, an area described by Henry Mayhew in about 1860 in A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood. The St Giles' slum, Bermondsey's, Jacob's Island, and the Old Nichol Street Rookery in the East End of London were demolished as part of London slum clearance and urban redevelopment projects in the late 19th century. The Rookery of St Giles appears in Neil Gaiman's short storyA Study in Emerald as the place where the antagonist and his sidekick reputedly take shelter after committing their crime. In 1850 the English novelist Charles Dickens was given a guided tour of several dangerous rookeries by "Inspector Field, the formidable chief detective of Scotland Yard". A party of six—Dickens, Field, an assistant commissioner, and three lower ranks —made their way into the Rat's Castle, backed by a squad of local police within whistling distance. The excursion started in the evening and lasted until dawn. They went through St Giles and even worse slums, in the Old Mint, along the Ratcliffe Highway and Petticoat Lane. The results of this and other investigations came out in novels, short stories, and straight journalism, of which Dickens wrote a great deal. Oliver Twist features the rookery at Jacob's Island: In Sketches by Boz, Dickens described a rookery: Thomas Beame's The Rookeries of London also described one: Kellow Chesney gives a whole chapter, Citadels of the Underworld, to the rookeries of London. At their zenith they were a problem that seemed impossible to solve, yet eventually they did decline. Changes in the law, the growing effectiveness of the police, slum clearances, and perhaps the growing prosperity of the economy gradually had their effect.
