This location is featured in Dicken’s ‘litle dorrit’. Up until the mid 19th century the area from what is now New Oxford Street to Farringdon Road was a maze of narrow streets and alleyways – an area know as the Rookery – or another name for a slum. The narrow streets would have been filled with cheaply built houses, in which each room would have been filled with one or more families. The area was cleared in the mid 19th century as part of the slum clearance plans.