Rookery Review: The Colony of Rooks and the Old Word for the Slums

A rookery is a colony of nesting rooks – but the word also named the notorious slums of old London, giving it a dark double history

The Rookery in Clapham holds two hundred and ninety-seven reviews and a 4.1 – a solid score on a good sample – and it carries a name with a fascinating double history: a rookery is a colony of nesting rooks, the sociable black birds – but the same word once named the most notorious slums of old London, giving it a surprisingly dark second meaning.

The colony of rooks

A “rookery” is, first and literally, a colony of rooks – the large, sociable, black members of the crow family that nest together in noisy communal colonies high in the treetops. Rooks are highly social birds, gathering in great numbers, and their rookeries – clusters of untidy nests in the tops of tall trees, filled with cawing, wheeling, gregarious birds – are a characteristic and evocative feature of the English landscape, especially around old parkland, churchyards and country estates.

Rooks are genuinely fascinating birds – intelligent, social, and long associated in folklore with everything from weather-prediction to death-omens to communal justice (the “rook parliament” of legend, where the birds supposedly judge one of their number). Their communal, chattering, gregarious colonies gave the word “rookery” its core meaning: a crowded, noisy, densely-populated communal settlement, teeming with sociable life.

The slums of old London

And here the word takes a dark turn. By extension from the crowded, teeming, chaotic rook colonies, “rookery” became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common name for the worst slums of London – the densely-packed, overcrowded, desperately poor and often criminal districts where the destitute crowded together in appalling conditions. The most notorious was the St Giles Rookery, near what is now the West End – a labyrinth of filthy, overcrowded courts and alleys, a byword for poverty, disease, crime and squalor.

These “rookeries” were the dark heart of Victorian London’s poverty – the overcrowded, insanitary, crime-ridden slums that so horrified reformers and inspired the works of Dickens (whose novels are full of such places) and the campaigns of social reformers. The comparison to the crowded, chaotic rook colony was apt and grim: human beings packed together in teeming, desperate, chaotic masses, like birds crammed into a rookery. The word carried a real weight of horror and pity in Victorian London.

The double meaning

So “The Rookery” carries, in a single word, both the natural and the social, the rural and the urban, the charming and the grim – the evocative colony of black birds in the treetops, and the notorious slums of old London. It is one of those words, like several we have met in this survey, whose meaning has travelled far from its origin, gathering dark associations along the way. Whether the pub intends the birds or the slums (surely the birds), the word carries both histories, and both are worth knowing.

The Prat’s naming desk rather admires a pub bold enough to bear a name that once meant “slum” – there is a certain honest, unpretentious, faintly rakish quality to it, quite in keeping with the character of a good local. And the birds, at least, are entirely charming.

The pub

A solid, well-regarded pub doing a fair 4.1 across a good sample, named “The Rookery” for the colony of sociable black rooks – and, in its darker second meaning, for the notorious teeming slums of old London.

Verdict

Solid, well-regarded, and named with a word of fascinating double history – the charming colony of rooks, and the grim slums of Victorian London.

Have a pint at the Rookery, and enjoy the double meaning – the noisy, sociable colony of black birds in the treetops, and the teeming old London slum that borrowed their crowded name.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]