holy land, n. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang

holy land n.

[SE holy ground/land, an area within church jurisdiction in which villains or persecuted people could gain sanctuary. The slums and criminal ghettos were often impervious to the law; St Giles is the patron saint of beggars; Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants (1887), notes: ‘An old fancy chaunt [that] ends every verse thus: “For we are the boys of the holy ground / And we’ll dance upon nothing and turn us around.”’]

1. a red-light district or slum.

1827

High Life in London 30 Dec. 4/4: Yes, we have witnessed sad scenes at Almacks’: yet not worse [...] than have immortalized the Holylands, and embalmed the memory of Alsatia.

2. (also holy ground) the area around St Giles, London, including Seven Dials.

1817		J.T. Smith Vagabondiana 49: The parish of St. Giles in the Fields. This latter place, which is their principal residence, is called their colony, and is styled by them ‘The Holy Land;’ in the centre of it there is a mass of building called ‘Rats’ Castle’.
1822		‘The Sprees of Tom, Jerry and Logick’ in C. Hindley James Catnach (1878) 124: Then to the Holy Land they went disguis’d from top to toe.
1827		Egan Anecdotes of the Turf, the Chase etc. 184: Such was the tie-up between Sporting betsey and Gooseberry jemmy in the Holy Land.
1830		Egan Finish to the Adventures of Tom and Jerry (1889) 249: I will carry you to the back settlements in the Holy Land, where you shall get a sound bating for your [...] impertinence.
1834		Australian (Sydney) 6 June 4/2: SCENE VI. Back Slums in the holy land, in a beggerly light.
1846		Swell’s Night Guide 67: I used allays to my dossings in the Holy Land, and on the Dials.
1859		G.A. Sala Twice Round the Clock 350: Unfaithful topographers may have told you that the ‘Holy Land’ being swept away and Buckeridge Street being pulled down, St. Giles’s exists no more.
1860		R. Nicholson Rogue’s Progress (1966) 221: ‘Paddy from Cork and Dublin Peg shaking the Tersichorean leg’ within the classic region of the ‘Holy Land’.
1860		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc. (2nd edn).
1877		London Standard 22 Feb. 3/5: The most degraded specimens of the denizens of what is known by the cruel irony of thieves’ slang as the ‘oly Land’.
1890		York Herald 12 Apr. 12/5: St Giles-in-the-Fields, once given up almost exclusively to Irish poor, acquired fame as the ‘Holy Land’.
1891		Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette 3 Apr. 215/ 1: It would be hard to say whether the Irishmen of the Holy Land or the Hebrew scum of Petticoat Lane showed the finest specimens of ‘looped and windowed raggedness’ [F&H].

3. any area of a city populated by or frequented by Jews.

1937–84

Partridge DSUE (1984) 562/2: from ca. 1875.

4. (Aus.) Tasmania.

1888		C.D. Ferguson Experiences of a Forty-Niner 373: The well understood slang of the ‘Holy Land’ as [...] Tasmania is called by the ‘old men’.
1889		J. Furphy in Bulletin (Sydney) 5 Oct. 8/2: they always spoke of the Cabbage Garden as ‘Port Phillip’, of the Holy Land as ‘tother side’.