On the south eastern edge of Fitzrovia around the still existing Bainbridge Street and Dyott Street was, until the mid-19 century, a jumble of densely populated and shambolic dwellings known as the St Giles Rookery.
Author Adam Crymble, in an academic paper for Urban History journal, asks why it became the city’s most notorious slum by the eighteenth century, and why it occurred where it did and why it lasted for so long.
Crymble argues that “we cannot take at face value either William Hogarth’s depiction of the Rookery in the background of ‘Gin Lane’ (1751), nor the serene depictions of the same in John Wykeham Archer’s paintings a century later (1844), which portrayed the Rookery as quiet, lonely and perhaps unloved”.
Instead, the Rookery of St Giles-in-the-Fields was always high risk because of happenstance of geography, a lack of leadership from its owners, and a system of urban upkeep that distributed responsibility too widely which led to its longevity and the depth of its misfortune.