Smithfield Meat Market London. Keep!!

Thanks to Ted Geier for the amazing history of Smithfield Market, London. The first written record of a weekly live stock market was 1174. Thomas Becket’s clerk described the area as a smooth field where there was a weekly sale of fine cows horses, swine and huge oxen. Animals were walked to Smithfield, were fattened up and sold. The slaughtering would then take place inside the City walls, at Newgate Shambles or Eastcheap, but in the 1300s the slaughter of animals moved to Smithfield, next to the River Fleet. A 1327 charter issued by Edward II made Smithfield London’s oldest meat market.

St Barts Hospital opened in 1123, the world’s oldest hospital. Just next door to the market, it was an important resource (and NB St Bartholomew was the patron saint of butchers). And Smithfield was a popular with the public in the medieval period for football, wrestling, archery, jousting & executions. The Elms at Smithfield is London’s oldest execution site; William Braveheart Wallace being hanged in 1305; Wat Tyler, leader of 1381 Peasant Revolt, was beheaded there; and where hundreds of Protestants were burnt at the stake for Queen Mary I in 1555-8. So the City’s bloody past was largely state-imposed! Tyburn Tree was the infamous gallows spot, now called Marble Arch.

Jones designed a dead meat building to house all services under one roof

Facebook

Animals trotted to the site from the Midlands in the medieval era; by C16th, cattle and sheep drovers linked Wales and Scotland to Smithfield. As the city’s population grew over time, the market also grew. 2,000,000 sheep and 200,000 cows were annually taken to Smithfield by mid C19th, causing horrid noise, unsanitary & congested, filth over flowing into the surrounding lanes.

The livestock market was later seen as unsuitable in this location and in 1852, the Smithfield Market Removal Act was passed, prompting the live cattle market to be relocated to Islington. 3 years later, the Bartholomew Fair was closed for good. Having brought cloth trading and all manner of revelry to Smithfield since 1133, it became a threat to public order! A growing criticism brought Smithfield into contempt for all its noise and stink, especially when London’s under-ground transit system was extended to Farringdon in 1863!

Smithfield was home to ancient professional guilds. Worshipful Co. of Butchers was based at Bartholomew Close since starting in c975, its members often heavily involved in City politics, including opposing the Removal Act of 1852. The Butchers was the only old trade organisation to remain active; other Livery Companies lived on as charities.

And Smithfield has a central place in the history of animal welfare law. The Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822 aimed to prevent the cruel treatment of cattle. Often cited as the first piece of animal rights legislation in the world, it arose partly from animal abuse at Smithfield. Father Arthur Broome, who co-founded the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-RSPCA 200 years ago, personally paid for market inspectors to monitor animal abuse.

The name Smithfield came from Smooth Field, the smooth grassy fields that once lay on the banks of the River Fleet. It was one of London’s lost rivers, that still flows underground beneath Farringdon Road. Note Charles Dickens described it thus: the ground was covered nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire; and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. Countrymen, butchers and drovers, mingled in a dense mass: drovers whistling, dogs barking, beasts bellowing, and hawkers shouting loudly.

Meat shops

The Conversation

Later Smithfield had no live animals so a state-of-the art New Market Building was needed. Horace Jones, City of London’s Architect and Surveyor, was commissioned to design it in 1866, and later he went on to design Billingsgate Market building, Leadenhall Market and then notably Tower Bridge. Billingsgate fish market, marked for closure in the same Corporation vote, will also stay.

Horace Jones' designed a wonderful entrance 

Building Design

The Victorian market he designed was functional AND beautiful, with its intricate and colourful design. The East and West market buildings were designed, opening in 1868. The design was state-of-the-art, using a lot of cast iron and glass to keep the market cool, crucial for meat and to maintain cleanliness. And revolutionary in that it was built over the first underground railway-line.

Metropolitan freight trains delivered meat into Jones’ huge basement of brick arches and iron girders. The meat was brought up to ground level for sale via hydraulic lift, or spiral ramp outside. It sits over a cross-section of 3 railway lines, one from the Chatham & Dover Railway, and one heading Eastwards. The impressive ramp leads down to the underground carpark below the rotunda. A Poultry Market structure followed in 1875 (and rebuilt post-fire in 1958) and the General Market building in 1883.

Meat rationing era which ended in 1954

Conversation

Smithfield Market was closed in WW2. The Government did not want crowds in buildings that were easily recognisable from the air. The decentralisation of meat stores ended to Smithfield’s trading and in 1942, the Poultry Market was damaged by a German bomb. In 1954 rationing on meat was lifted and Smithfield Market was back to normal. Meat then came from Australia, N.Zealand, Africa and Sth America, brought by rail via unloading bays underneath the building. The great displays of carcasses and the grand cast iron structure of Horace Jones’ building were restored. Lots of the businesses were still family run, often for generations. Visit the whole-sale meat market by day and admire the beautiful Victorian architecture. Or visit at 6.30am, at the end of the market’s very busy night activities.

In 2024 City of London Corporation voted to withdraw financial support for Smithfield Market, inspiring a petition to Protect Our Heritage and declarations in the British press that the soul of London will be butchered. At stake, defenders say, is a living legacy of meat trade that began there 1,000+ years ago, and the site of a rich seam of British history. But the market’s history was always one of change, involving shifts in justice, taste, hygiene and civic order.

The oldest meat and fish markets in London, now 850 years old, face permanent closure in 2028. Smithfield meat market, near St Paul's Cathedral, and Billingsgate fish market in Canary Wharf, are to be closed after the City of London Corporation voted to withdraw support. Work has already begun, turning this site into a new cultural and commercial hub, including the new permanent galleries of London Museum. Some of the disused buildings in the complex are already being restored.