“The Rookery,” was a triangular space bounded by Bainbridge, George, and High Streets; it 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 orginally 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 panes of broken glass, the walls were the colour of bleached soot, and doors fell from their hinges and worm-eaten posts. Many of the windows announced, “Lodgings at 3d. a night,” where the wild wanderers from town to town held their nightly revels.” (Timbs’ Curiosities of London (1867), p. 378.)