Smithfield has been the site of a market since at least 1174. The current market was built in 1860s.
Credit...Carl Court/Getty Images

850-Year-Old Smithfield Meat Market in London to Close

The historic site in Britain’s capital has been a market for centuries. The local authority voted this week to close it.

by · NY Times

For 22 years, John Burt has cut and trimmed steaks, chops and roasts in a butcher shop across the street from Smithfield, the oldest meat market in London. In that time, he said, he has watched the market’s slow decline, from a carnivore’s bustling bazaar to a hulking relic of an earlier London.

Still, the news this week that Smithfield will close — its owner, the City of London Corporation, killed a plan to move the market to a new site in East London — came as something of a jolt to him.

“I’m sad about it,” said Mr. Burt, 64, whose shop is separate from the market and will stay in business. “You wouldn’t have thought that Smithfield Market would ever shut down because it’s been around since the time of Henry VIII.”

Even longer, actually: Smithfield has been the site of a market since at least 1174, when medieval traders brought horses, cows, oxen and pigs to be sold there. In 1327, King Edward III gave the governing body of the City of London the right to operate Smithfield and other food markets. The current market, completed in 1868, is a marvel of Victorian engineering, with a cavernous roof and train tracks running underneath it (to transport the livestock).

It is, however, “totally out of date,” said Simon Jenkins, a journalist and the author of “A Short History of London.”

In an era of supermarket chains, which buy produce directly from far-flung food-processing plants, a wholesale meat market in the heart of London makes little sense. The fruit and vegetable market at Covent Garden was moved out of the city center in the 1970s; the fish market migrated to Canary Wharf in 1982.

Mr. Burt said he thought the local authorities had been itching to remove rattling delivery trucks from the warren of streets around Smithfield, which is ringed by upmarket pubs and restaurants. The property, in any case, is more valuable as a site for offices, apartments or retail businesses.

The City of London, an ancient governing body, said that the traders would be allowed to keep operating at Smithfield until at least 2028, and said that they would be compensated for the cost of relocating their business.

Mr. Jenkins, who has campaigned to conserve London’s architectural heritage, said he was hopeful that the market would be turned into a cultural and shopping mecca that would rival the redeveloped Covent Garden. An adjacent building, which housed a poultry market, is being converted into a new home for the Museum of London, though Mr. Jenkins said it was a “scandal” that the meat market hung on long enough to prevent the museum from taking over the entire site.

For the City of London, the sunset of Smithfield is a rare disappointment, given its ambitions and resourcefulness in developing what it refers to as the Square Mile, the oldest part of London. Thrusting skyscrapers have transformed the district into a kind of Chicago-on-Thames. The corporation’s original plan was to move the Smithfield market and the Billingsgate fish market to a vast new site on the Dagenham Docks, in East London.

But the corporation said inflation and rising construction costs had made the project unaffordable. Some critics have argued that the decision was flawed because it failed to account for the impact of the loss of the market on food security in the British capital.

In a glass-is-half-full statement, Chris Hayward, the policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, called it a “positive new chapter for the Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets in that it empowers traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their long-term business goals.”

It is not the first time the City of London has had to shelve an ambitious project. In 2021, it pulled the plug on a dramatic new concert hall — estimated to cost 288 million pounds, or $365 million — which would have been a new home for the London Symphony Orchestra. It blamed the coronavirus pandemic, though the departure of Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s conductor and a vocal champion of the project, may have also played a role.

“What this proves again is that while they’re still capable of doing things they’ve been doing for centuries, there’s a limit even to what they can do in terms of development,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics and an authority on city planning at the London School of Economics.

The decision, he said, also underlines the unsentimental nature of many Londoners toward their history. The City of London, he noted, had long resisted allowing skyscrapers. But after Canary Wharf put up a forest of towers and threatened the city’s status as a financial center, the corporation abruptly reversed course. Nearly a dozen new towers are scheduled to go up there by 2030.

“Intriguingly, for a country as old and interested in its history as the U.K., people are surprisingly willing to move on,” Professor Travers said.

Already, Smithfield has the faintly nostalgic air of a museum. Placards tell passers-by about the history of the market, which is even more blood-soaked than one might imagine. In 1305, the Scottish independence leader, William Wallace, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the site. During the reign of Queen Mary I, in the 16th century, Protestants were burned to death as heretics there.

Smithfield’s next chapter is being written in more bloodless language. The City of London said it would work with the traders to help them “transition seamlessly and successfully to new locations.” But they are under no obligation to stay in business, and Mr. Burt said he expected many would retire.

“Most of them are older than me,” he said, noting that he will soon turn 65. “Do they really want to go off and start another business? I don’t think so. There aren’t many meat markets left around the country; it’s a dying trade.”

Around the World With The Times

Our reporters across the globe take you into the field.