Reading the Rookery: The Social Meaning of an Irish Slum in Nineteenth-Century London

Located at the southern area of St. Giles at the northwest end of Drury Lane, the St. Giles “Rookery” was the first and the most notorious Irish district in nineteenth-century London. About eight acres in extent, the Rookery was a perpetually decaying slum seemingly always on the verge of social and economic collapse; in her study of the Irish in Victorian Britain, Lynn Hollen Lees described it as “one of the foulest places in London.”¹ At the heart of this sprawling settlement was a tangled mass of alleys and walkways, which became known during the eighteenth century as the “Irish Rookery” or “Little Dublin.” As the names suggest, the residents were almost entirely of Irish extraction; the district often served as the first accommodation for those newly arrived in the city. This was in part because, as Roger Swift notes, “it had a reputation in Ireland for being generous in poor relief,” although—in Swift’s account, at least—this generosity had an unfortunate side effect of attracting “the least desirable Irish who quickly became demoralized and absorbed into a rookery of thieves and beggars.”² Even by the standards of the time, living conditions at St. Giles were appalling. As Thomas Beames noted in an account from 1852, “Rookeries are bad, but what are they to Irish Rookeries?”³

As with many other sites of urban deprivation in London, the Rookery was built on the site of an old leper colony, and was organized around a series of interlinked galleried courts that were essentially medieval in origin. It was this confusion of alleys that suggested to the curious observer the image of the labyrinth, dark and impenetrable. Charles Knight’s extensive report of 1842 describes the Rookery as “one great maze of narrow crooked paths crossing and intersecting in labyrinthine convolutions.”⁴ Similarly, John Timbs’s retrospective account from 1855 recalled that the district was

one dense mass of houses, through which curved narrow tortuous lanes, from which again diverged close courts—one great mass, as if the houses had originally been one block of stone, eaten by slugs into numberless small chambers and connecting passages. The lanes were thronged with loiterers; and stagnant gutters, and piles of garbage and filth infested the air. In the windows, wisps of straw, old hats, and lumps of bed-tick or brown paper, alternated with shivered pains of broken glass; the walls were the colour of bleached soot, and doors fell from their hinges and worm-eaten posts.⁵

Even by 1855, when Timbs was writing, the St. Giles Rookery as he describes it had nearly disappeared. Yet something of its horror clings to his account.

The Rookery was a disorientating place that for many years defied the attempts of London’s developers to impose order and rationality on the chaos of urban poverty. To enter its environs was to surrender one’s status under the law and to place oneself in the jurisdiction of quite different social economies. What happened in the Rookery had a regulation of its own; there were frequent stories of people unwittingly straying into the maze of alleyways and never emerging. It was, as the Morning Chronicle put it in 1834, a “place known as a receptacle for persons of the lowest description,” a base for predatory “barefooted gangs” of young Irish men who “in the most discordant strains bawl out sea songs to the annoyance of peaceable inhabitants”—and it was also what passed for home for hundreds of the city’s beggars.⁶ Frederick Engels would be still more vivid, reporting with horror that

here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.⁷

The worst of the Rookery was yet to come, however. Following the Famine...