] To the west of St Pauls, the area around Ludgate Hill through to St Giles was a notorious rookery (no-go area) and well known for its houses of ill-repute. The Fleet debtors prison was here, and the Fleet itself (then a noxious smelling river).

It is correct that St Giles (now the area around Centrepoint, where Tottenham Court Road Meets Oxford Street) was a famously grim rookery and that the Fleet was noxious (as well as the prison Smithfield Market is still situated there and it used to be an abbatoir as well as meat market). However, if the area between had been all one rookery it would have been vast indeed!

In fact, between the Fleet and the Rookery of St Giles were various more salubrious districts - many of which survive to the present day. The area around Hatton Garden had been market gardens and is now the centre of the jewellery trade, in JA's time it seems to have been a mixture of jewellers and clockmakers and outpost of Clerkenwell which was an area of skilled craftsmen of various trades. Further west the Inns of Court are situated - an area dedicated to the law then and now. North of this is Holborn, (inhabited by Dickens in his prosperous days.) To the West of Holborn and the Inns of Court is Covent Garden, already a theatrical district if not altogether respectable especially as it shaded into the notorious rookery of St Giles.

I am risking drifting rather far from the point so I wont go on, but I think it is important to see the London of the time as a hotch-potch with the craftsmen of Clerkenwell living next to the poor of the rookeries, the elegant Inns of Court, cheek by jowel with slums. And of course in Jane Austen's day the whole area was already built up and was undergoing changes at a furious pace.