Grub Street

Road on the north side of the city of London. It became the squalid resort of hack writers in the 17th century, and the term was applied by metaphorical extension to all literary work thought to be scurrilous, pornographic, seditious, or ephemeral and transient.

The street itself was renamed Milton Street in 1830 and was obliterated by the Barbican development in the 1980s, but the metaphoric sense remains.

The actual associations of the place (disease, refuse, poverty, venality) become powerful symbolic associations in satirical literature of the 18th century, for example in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728–43).