backslum

English

Etymology

From back +‎ slum.

Noun

backslum (plural backslums)

1. A slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.
   • 1875, Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, page 392:

     It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally.

   • 1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 30:

     He was wrong there, for around the second next corner they ran into quite a different sort of landscape; a jumbled up place of city residences and back slums[.]

References

• John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary