The Clerkenwell Rookery

Clerkenwell had a long tradition as a criminal area. This was particularly true of the streets and alleyways along the river Fleet, which offered a convenient means of escape once crimes had been committed in the City. Turnmill street was the centre of this activity, a thoroughfare with an infamous reputation dating back to the sixteenth century. One part of the street was known as 'Jack Ketch's Warren' because of the large number of its residents who met their end on the gallows... Another part, Pickhatch, was a celebrated haunt of coiners, pickpockets and prostitutes. A little to the north, Hockley-in-the-hole, part of which today survives as Ray Street, was a centre for bear-baiting and bull-fighting in the eighteenth century. The spot was frequented by rich noblemen and ambassadors as well as by the local poor, and so provided an excellent base for villains...

Clerkenwell thus had a rich pedigree as a rogue's territory, and managed to maintain its reputation for most of the nineteenth century. The district was thought to be more violent even than St. Giles, and was reputed to have the densest criminality and highest murder rate in London. A comprehensive survey of criminal life published in 1861 identified it particularly as a home of pickpockets, receivers, coiners, and child strippers (drunken women who enticed children away in order to steal their clothes), although it is clear that the full range of criminal occupations was in fact represented. A vivid article from the Illustrated London News of 22nd May 1847 conveys something of the atmosphere of the place.
 

"Many of our readers are in no doubt familiar with the densely-peopled, dirty, confused, huddled, locality.... Many of them have, we doubt not, been bewildered amid its dingy, swarming alleys - have emerged from its squalid courts, crowded with tattered, sodden-looking women, and hulking unwashed men - clustering around the doors of coarse, low-browed public houses; or seated by dingy unwindowed shops, frowsy with piles of dusty, ricketty rubbish, or reeking with the odour of coarse food - lumps of carrion-like meat simmering in greasy pans and brown, crusty-looking morsels of fish, still gluey with the oil in which they have been fried...

In Clerkenwell, there is a grovelling starving poverty. In Clerkenwell broods the darkness of utter ignorance. In its lanes and alleys the lowest debauch-the coarsest enjoyment - the most infuriate passions - the most unrestrained vice - roar and riot. The keeper of the 'fence' loves to set up business there - you see the stolen handkerchieves fluttering in his den. Low public houses abound, where thieves drink and smoke... The burglar has his 'crib' in Clerkenwell - the pickpocket has his mart... It is the locality of dirt, and ignorance and vice - the recesses whereof are but known to the disguised policeman, as he gropes his way up ricketty staircases towards the tracked housebreaker's den - or the poor shabby genteel City missionary, as he kneels at midnight by the foul straw of some convulsed and dying outcast" 

Two very important forms of income in the are were pickpocketing and prostitution. There were a large number of brothels in the district, particularly in Brewhouse Yard, Greyhound Court and White's Yard, and the girl's fathers were often the proprietors. A large number of 'fences', receivers of stolen property, lived in Wilderness Row, Red Lion Street, Saffron Hill and Field Lane, and many of these also acted as tutors in the art of pickpocketing. Indeed, some of the most famous scenes in Dicken's Oliver Twist are set in Saffron Hill... Dickens knew Saffron Hill well, and there were indeed several notorious theives' schools in the Clerkenwell neighbourhood...

Dickens brought home to the reader the importance of the low lodging house or 'thieves' kitchen' in criminal organisation. These buildings offered cheap accommodation, and lodgers were allowed use of a communal kitchen for cooking. In 1854 another observer described how he had visited one of these institutions in Field Lane, and had seen men and boys sleeping on floors, under benches and over tables, strewn about the place on top of one another 'like eels in a dish'. Given the level of overcrowding in London at this time, it was all too easy for the honest unemployed or destitute to drift into a low lodging house and become influenced by the criminals who planned their activities there.

The most notorious of these houses to be uncovered in Clerkenwell was the Red Lion Inn in West Street. The building's secrets were revealed in 1844 as workers cleared the area for the construction of Farringdon Road. Inside was a complex network of closets, sliding panels, secret recesses and trap doors. These gave access to an exit overlooking the Fleet Ditch. On occasions when a suspect was being pursued by a police officer, a plank was kept at hand in order to bridge the river, and this would be drawn into the opposite house immediately after use. The suspect could then reach Black Boy Alley and disappear among the maze of courts around Crow Cross. Famous fugitives from the eighteenth century, such as Jack Sheppard and Jerry Abshaw, had been concealed. Judging from the number of bones found in the building, it was clear that the Red Lion had been used to cover up many a murder.

Enough has been said to show that Clerkenwell was an extremely dangerous locality. Victims of violent crime, some dead, some still alive, were routinely tossed into the fetid waters of the Fleet. It is not surprising that for the first half of the nineteenth century much of the rookery remained a no-go area for law officers.