The last of the great old blood and guts markets in London, Smithfield, is to close completely after eight busy, noisy centuries. Operating since the 12th century, King Edward III gave it the freedom to open in 1327, not long after the same site had been used for the gruesome execution of the Scottish rebel William Wallace.
Until the Victorian era, the animals were slaughtered on the spot. It was never a pretty place, but it was full of fierce life, hard, dirty work, heavy loads and late nights. When I first started work in Fleet Street nearly 50 years ago, those who fancied a pint of bitter with their full English breakfast could walk the short distance to the Smithfield pubs, which had special very late (or very early) licences to serve the needs of exhausted, hungry, bloodstained butchers and meat porters (and the occasional bloodshot newspaperman). But we do not like this sort of thing as much as we used to.
The Covent Garden vegetable market went long before, displaced by a tourist zone – as did its cousin in France at Les Halles. Once known as ‘the stomach of Paris’, it is now supplanted by the hideous Pompidou Centre. Billingsgate Fish Market, where the foul language was as acrid and pungent as the ancient fishy stink that clung to the building, has been hived off to some modernised district.
Even at Smithfield, everything became far more plastic-wrapped, sealed, hygienic, regulated and deodorised in its later years.
London butchers used to associate red meat with the hard strength needed for the brutal and dangerous manual work that kept Britain going well into the 20th century. In certain parts of London, as my Swiss mother-in-law discovered to her amazement in the 1950s, they assumed that a woman buying steak was buying it for her docker husband. While they wrapped it, they would ask her what she planned to give the rest of the family.
In general, the world has grown less hard-working, less male, less smelly, less earthy, less meaty. The final death sentence for Smithfield symbolises this neatly. Yet it is amazing how quickly this has happened.
Perhaps some of it is driven by the growing sympathy for vegetarianism and veganism among the young, or just from the incessant proclamations that red meat is, in fact, bad for us. Perhaps some of it results from the rather suspect belief that farm animals contribute to the warming of the planet, a belief now as powerful and nearly as intolerant as those of the religious factions that once burned each other to death at Smithfield.
In my own home town of Oxford, I can still remember the great cattle market, which persisted well into the otherwise modern 1960s. On one day each week, the great pens near the station filled up with steaming cattle for sale, superintended by men in bullet-proof tweeds with boiled puce faces and looks of permanent suspicion, as they mocked the prices their fellow-farmers first proposed.
The historic Smithfields meat market is set to close after more than 800 years
Butchers at Smithfield in 1935. Until the Victorian era, the animals were slaughtered on the spot – the market being a place full of fierce life and hard, dirty work
Crowds flock to the Christmas meat auction which returned last year for the first time since the Covid pandemic
The earthy methane-tinged perfume of this gathering rose in a cloud above the western edge of the city, sometimes mixing – if the wind was right – with the yeasty, seductive smells from the nearby brewery (now also closed and converted into expensive flats).
The voices, the look of it, the aroma and the dark rural colours of men and beasts were much as they would have been three centuries before, or earlier still. And then, abruptly, it all stopped, no doubt thanks to a plan for modernisation and cleanliness, leaving the abandoned pens empty and forlorn for years until they were eventually replaced by ugly student accommodation.
And yet the town’s other market – a covered one – survived. Until a few Christmases ago it still seemed to flourish. About this time of year, my favourite butcher would begin an annual festival for carnivores. Outside the Victorian shop would hang whole wild boar, whole deer and quantities of recently shot pheasants, most of them bleeding onto the stone flags beneath. Dozens of huge hams (which you had to cook in black treacle) were suspended from cruel hooks inside the shop.
Enormous queues would form on Christmas Eve, in which families would stand in shifts, clutching cash to carry away these wonders. But in recent years, the generations that still enjoyed these sort of things faded, and the Great Panic over Covid pretty much put a stop to it, so it has been some years now since any wild boar hung from the rack.
We have to go instead to supermarkets, where all is wrapped and bloodless and you cannot exchange rude Christmas jokes with the bleeping robots that film you as they take your money and tell you where you can and cannot put your shopping.
Do we really enjoy this? Must it be compulsory? Markets are fun. Even in Moscow, where we used to buy meat, fruit and fresh vegetables, there was a pleasure and a challenge in venturing into these chaotic horns of plenty, almost certainly run by the local mafia.
The cuts of meat were mysterious and often unknown to us (I wasn’t always sure what animal I was buying a hunk of), the traders and the stalls were dirty and bashed, the weighing machines dubious – and the weights of course in the crude metric system, as you would expect in a despotism.
A porter carries crates of kippers into Billingsgate Fish Market in 1947
The site moved to Canary Wharf in east London in the 1980s. Plans to move it to a £1billion site in Dagenham along with Smithfield have been scrapped by the City of London Corporation
Nobody spoke a syllable of English and, as a rich foreigner, you were liable to be diddled if you showed any sign of weakness. But I have come away from such places with a better chicken than you have ever eaten, and the most delicious gold-flecked tomatoes I have ever experienced. And I will never again eat cherries as wonderful as the dusty, untidy bunch from Daghestan I once bought, flown up that morning from the shores of the Caspian Sea. Modern hygiene inspectors would no doubt have rejected them.
Yes, I know that many farmers’ markets have sprung up in recent years, and I appreciate them greatly. But they are not quite the same thing as the markets we have lost. And the thing I really cannot stand – though it obviously fulfils a need to stand in the open air buying things – is the plague of ‘Christmas Markets’, which has now erupted in this country.
One near me has a full-size timber ‘Apres-Ski’ bar disfiguring the ancient city in which it stands. Not far away from this grotesque caricature of Germanic yuletide jollity stands the butcher’s stall, closed, locked and abandoned, which used to be the centre of a real Christmas market – one which assailed your nose, your eyes and your ears, and which created memories of Christmas in small children that they will carry all their lives.
I like things to be warm and clean and safe and brightly lit as much as anyone else does. But true civilisation rests on strength and courage, and on the knowledge of how tough and hard and cold the world can be. I sometimes think we have sanitised our world a bit too much for our own good.