Just before midnight, rows of illuminated HGVs block the streets around Smithfield Market in the City of London. Their open doors reveal rows of dangling pig carcasses waiting to be hung from overhead rails and delivered to the butchers inside.
Well-dressed passengers in black taxis – the last daytime city dwellers – wait in the traffic jam of trucks. On the side of the road, a driver set down a paper cup of tea and lit a cigarette through the window of his white van, as he waited for a load of pork and lamb for his twice-weekly delivery at the butchers of Esex.
“When I arrived here in 1957, one of the elders said to me: ‘Son, you better find another job. This market will not exist in a few years. They want to make it a bus station,” the 84-year-old veteran said.
The decision to close Smithfield from 2028, announced this week by the City of London Corporation, which owns the markets, follows decades of debate over its future. Closure was first discussed in 1925.
One by one, London’s other well-known wholesale markets – Covent Garden, Spitalfields and Borough – have succumbed to logistical challenges and the pressure of redevelopment of valuable land, transforming themselves into modern retail destinations and moving their sellers to more remote locations.
Already the former Smithfield Poultry Markets next door are surrounded by scaffolding as the city transforms them into a new London Museum.
The Square Mile’s governing body has now abandoned its £800 million-plus plan to move the markets from their aging premises to a site in Dagenham, closer to the eastern logistics and shipping routes along the Thames – saying building modern facilities would be too expensive.
Instead, after four months of secret negotiations, the city reached a deal with the inner circle of traders who run Smithfield and Billingsgate Fish Market, which will also close. Each group of traders will receive compensation of £150 million in exchange for not opposing the closure, according to people familiar with the terms.
“You could have stuck a knife in my heart, it hurt me a lot,” said Tony Lyons, chairman of the London Fish Merchants Association, who has traded from Billingsgate for almost 40 years and now has a daughter and two grandchildren in the family. farm.
The city has saved hundreds of millions of pounds, and wholesale butchers and fishmongers will receive payouts after decades of competition from larger suppliers and supermarkets which have slashed their already slim margins.
Parliament will have to legislate to end the city’s centuries-old obligation to host markets, a requirement that has strengthened the hand of traders.
“In a sense, everyone can win here,” said Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in local government. “The question is: is London as a whole the loser?
“A knife in the side”
Inside Smithfield, behind the glass display cases that line the central “shoppers walk,” butchers work hard with cleavers and saws among the hundreds of hanging carcasses, carving out cuts for their customers – who range from local butchers to restaurants, caterers and food. trucks.
Porters in white coats, called “bummerees” for reasons somewhat lost to history, brandish heavy boxes and clear plastic bags filled with cuts of meat. One of them rolls a shopping cart full of pallets of Red Bull to fuel the nighttime operation.
Their departure from this place located on the western edge of the Square Mile will mark a break after 900 years of continuity. The “smooth fields” just outside the old city walls were the scene of the cattle trade as early as the 12th century.
The region also experienced butchery of another kind. William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield. Another of many public executions was Wat Tyler, leader of the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt.
“Delicate uses are more easily placed on the edges,” Travers noted.
By the Victorian era, Smithfield was no longer on the edge of a rapidly growing metropolis that had swallowed it up. Driving the cattle to the center of the city brought dirt and chaos to the streets. The cattle market closed in the 1850s, and in 1868 the huge new Victorian meat market – with its vaulted ceiling and intricate painted ironwork – opened its doors to trade.
Once supplied by metros, the market has continued to evolve with technology. The first shipment of frozen meat arrived in London from Australia in 1880. By 1913, three-quarters of the meat sold came from overseas refrigerated, according to Jack Hanlon, a historian at Queen Mary University of London.
The market’s heyday was as a “global import market for Imperial London” in the interwar period, Hanlon said. Post-war changes in commerce and the rise of supermarkets led to a “fairly dramatic decline from the late 1960s”, he added.
Traders and butchers predict the closure of Smithfield will result in even fewer independent sellers supplying London.
“It’s quite catastrophic for us. A lot of small farmers could end up cutting off their deliveries to London because they won’t have that central place to drop them off,” said Tony Hindhaugh, co-owner of Parson’s Nose butchery in Fulham, who sends buyers to Smithfield every evenings.
Smithfield serves as a key center for butchery. Fewer and fewer butchers now accept whole carcasses, because their customers only want certain cuts. Smithfield’s wholesale butchers allocate the animals and sell them to retailers, based on the cuisines and prices demanded by their clientele.
“The least costly reductions will be the ones that suffer,” Hindhaugh said. “All of a sudden, those discounts that were cheap won’t be cheap anymore. Because the distribution is exorbitant. . . Wholesale margins are pitiful and becoming more and more so.
The loss of Smithfield also means fewer choices.
“It’s just a knife in the side of small businesses.” The bigger retail companies will be rubbing their hands with glee,” said Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association.
“As a restaurant you lose individuality. It will be the same meat as that of the local restaurant.
A cohort of town officials and some market traders, who have championed the new Dagenham site, are disappointed that the company is abandoning the operation of the markets and that traders have taken the money to go quietly.
“(Markets are) an important part of the range of services the company provides to its communities,” wrote Henry Pollard, chairman of the city’s markets board, in a letter to his fellow city councilors, objecting at closing.
“Why are we paying an unquantified amount to a group of stakeholders? There are more than £300 million in additional costs to pay tenants at Smithfield and Billingsgate – agreed by tenants’ association representatives and not all tenants – which have not been detailed or widely examined. , he wrote.
Some city leaders believe the market was the victim of overspending on its other construction projects and that the new market could have been built more cheaply.
“I don’t think we looked at all the options,” said Catherine McGuinness, the company’s former policy president.
The payout to traders could amount to more than £3 million per firm on average, depending on how it is ultimately split.
The Smithfield Merchants Association did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment. Lyons said Billingsgate merchants aimed to stick together and use the money and three years of grace to find a new owner.
“A few people are going to retire. If they are 65 and earn a few million pounds, they will live a good life for the rest of their years on this earth,” he said. “And those of us who want to continue trading are going to put in some effort and continue trading.”
Many Smithfield workers are also hoping to find new housing. “I hope we all end up together in a warehouse somewhere,” said Sharron Terry, who sells poultry at one of the stands. “It’s a very close-knit community.”
“Things have changed”
The loss of individuality in the capital’s meat supply will mean the loss of a single place, where different groups of Londoners came together.
“It’s this fairly large space in the center of London that’s moving at a completely different pace and on a completely different timetable. . . it will be lost for sure,” Hanlon said.
Edmund Weil ran a late-night bar under the Poultry Market for seven years, taking over the former home of the Cock Tavern. His 1940s-style cocktail bar and restaurant, Oriole, negotiated its exit alongside poultry traders and recently reopened near Covent Garden.
In the old pub, he said, the butchers finishing their shift sat alongside the bankers and ravers finishing their sleepless nights. “You might see a few people from Fabric (nightclub) and a few shopkeepers in town drinking their Guinness and eating a chip,” he said.
But on this frosty morning, no one is drinking at the Fox & Anchor, which always opens at 7 a.m. when business ends. As light seeps into the sky, the first morning commuters and joggers pass by. It seems that some of Smithfield’s picturesqueness is already fading.
“Things have changed over the years,” Lyons said. “There is no more Fleet Street. There are no more platforms. They’re all apartments and stuff. . . It was inevitable.
