Built around 1705 and demolished in 1950, Bridge House in George Row was once surrounded by the Jacob’s Island rookery.
Jacob’s Island was immortalised by Charles Dickens’s novel ’Oliver Twist’, in which the principal villain Bill Sikes meets a nasty end in the mud of ’Folly Ditch’.
Dickens was taken to this then-impoverished and unsavory location by the officers of the river police, with whom he would occasionally go on patrol. When a local politician attempted to deny the very existence of Jacob’s Island, Dickens gave him short shrift, describing the area as the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London. The area was once notoriously squalid and described as The very capital of cholera and The Venice of drains by the Morning Chronicle of 1849.
The ditches were filled in the early 1850s, and the area later redeveloped as warehouses.