rookery

plural rookeries

1. A colony of breeding birds or other animals.

   There are six rookeries either side of Haddiscoe Island, which average 283 nests each.

   2017 April 18, Mark Cocker, “Something is amiss with the Yare valley rooks”, in The Guardian

   2 more examples

   It was a rookery which had never been raided by the hunters, and in consequence the seals were mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid.

   1904, Jack London, chapter 30, in The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan’s Standard Library), New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC

   In winter rooks roost together in large numbers, and the roost may or may not be a rookery, but almost daily the local residents pay visits to the nesting trees, and about this time often begin playing at nest-building.

   1914 February 2, “Corvine conversation in Cheshire rookery”, in The Guardian

2. broadlyA crowded tenement.

   Lord John Roxton and I turned down Vigo Street together and through the dingy portals of the famous aristocratic rookery.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm. In their beds in the five-story rookery lay more than 100 tenants.

   1934 April 2, “Business: Tenements”, in Time, archived from the original on 05 Mar 2012

   The squares near Ladbroke Grove station ... never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington.

   2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 50, quoting Christian Wolmar

3. UKbroadlyhistoricalA place where criminals congregate, often an area of a town or city.

   The Flower and Dean St rookery had been home to many of those who lived at least partly by street crime.

   1980, Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: life in an East End tenement block, 1887-1920, page 128

   2 more examples

   These rookeries sustained criminal social systems that provided schooling in crime for the young and newcomers.

   1995, Cyrille Fijnaut, Changes in Society, Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe

   In the Victorian imagination, crime and the criminal class were always associated with rookeries, the dense slum areas in which criminals were said to live.

   1998, Stephen Inwood with Roy Porter, A History of London, page 522

   Synonyms: slum

4. obsoleteslanggovernmentThat part of the barracks occupied by subalterns.