Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. an illegal gambling establishment.

1840

R.B. Peake Devil In London I iii: (Three Policemen enter from house, carrying broken roulette tables, rakes, draught-board, cards, &c) [...] lord p.: ’Pon my life, you’re a fine fellow – you got me out of that scrape at the cottage most magnanimously. dev.: The cottage, sir! It appeared to me a house in a close London street. lord p.: How devilish green you are! It was a little quiet hell, my fine fellow!

2. (also cottage gardens) a public lavatory; thus anywhere male homosexuals gather for sex.

1909		J. Ware Passing Eng. of the Victorian Era 94/2: Cottages (Fast youths’). Vespasians; retiring points for half a minute. Said to be derived from the published particulars of an eccentrically worded will in which the testator left a large fortune to be laid out in building ‘cottages of convenience’.
1932		T. Croft Cloven Hoof 65: ‘Cottage’: a public lavatory.
1935		in M. Houlbrook Sun among Cities (2002) [from police record 8.5.35] 85: It is a nice night for a bit of fun but the cottage [meaning urinal] is full up.
1949		C. Allen Sexual Perversions & Abnormalities 291: Many people do not realize that these patients have a strange jargon in which perverts are ‘queer people’, lavatories are ‘cottages’, &c.
1959		B. Naughton ‘The Little Welsh Girl’ in Late Night on Watling Street (1969) 142: Near the Elephant there is a cottage for men, and it goes under the street.
1962		J. Gielgud letter 30 Aug. in Mangan John Gielgud’s Letters (2004) 281: Most of the cottages [in Venice] have gone or been redesigned.
1967		J. Orton Diaries (1986) 11 Mar. 112: ‘Found in a cottage she was,’ he said.
1977		D. Powis Signs of Crime 179: Cottage Public lavatory.
1988		(ref. to late 1940s) S. Humphries Secret World of Sex 193: If you wanted a piece of rough you’d look around the cottages in Covent Garden [...] the lorry drivers’ cottages. On the other hand if you wanted theatrical trade you’d do some of the cottages round the back of Jermyn Street.
1988		A. Hollinghurst Swimming-Pool Library (1998) 251: In a cottage one takes what one is given.
1991		in Porter & Weeks Between the Acts 130: There were no cottages in Greece until after the war, until the British troops got going [...] I was pretty careful. I always use stand-up cottages, I would never have gone into a cubicle.
2000		P. Howard Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (2004) 72: Cottage by the Sea! How Lonely Men are Finding Love in the Public Toilets . . . of Morecambe.
2004		J. McCourt ‘Vilja de Tanquay Exults’ in Queer Street 395: Do you know what cottage means in England, luv, [...] Means a loo / A public loo, that’s what, a bog, a crapper.
2010		W. Ings ‘Trolling the Beat to Working the Soob’ in Int’l Jrnl Lexicog. 23:1 62: Coded names for specific beats included the Hanging Gardens, the Garden of Eden [...] and the Cottage Gardens.
2019		P. Baker Fabulosa 290/2: cottage a public lavatory or urinal.
2023		R. Milward Man-Eating Typewriter 108: ‘A dolly choco-box cottage in Londres, was it?’.

3. attrib. use of sense 2.

1996		A. Close Official and Doubtful 282: HIV positive from an unlucky brush with the cottage industry.
2001		Guardian 27 Jan. 22: There have been no worthy successors to that prodigy of the cottage ephiphanies.