last orders for London’s historic meat market

Just before midnight, floodlit rows of heavy lorries block the streets around Smithfield market in the City of London. Their open doors reveal rows of dangling pig carcasses waiting to be hooked on to overhead rails and delivered to the butchers inside.

Well-dressed passengers in black cabs — the last of the daytime City dwellers — wait in the log jam of trucks. To the side of the road, one driver put down a paper cup of tea and reached to light a cigarette out the window of his white van, as he waited for a load of pork and lamb for his twice-weekly delivery to butcher shops in Essex.

“When I first came here in 1957, one of the old-timers said to me: ‘Son, you better get another job. This market will not be here in a couple of years. They want to make it into a bus station’,” the 84-year-old veteran said.

The decision to close Smithfield as soon as 2028, announced this week by the City of London Corporation, which owns the markets, follows decades of debate over its future. Closure was first mooted in 1925.

One by one, London’s other storied wholesale markets — Covent Garden, Spitalfields and Borough — have succumbed to logistical challenges and the pressure to redevelop valuable land, transforming into modern retail destinations and moving their vendors to locations further out. 

Already, the former Smithfield poultry markets next door are shrouded in scaffolding as the City transforms them into a new London Museum.

The Square Mile’s governing body has now scrapped its more than £800mn plan to move the markets from their ageing premises to a site in Dagenham, closer to the logistics and shipping routes east along the river Thames — saying that building the modern facilities would be too expensive.

Instead, over four months of secret talks, the City hammered out a deal with the tight circle of traders who run Smithfield and the Billingsgate fish market, which will also shut. Each group of traders will receive compensation of £150mn in exchange for not fighting the closure, according to people familiar with the terms. 

“You could have stuck a knife in my heart, it hurt me that much,” said Tony Lyons, chair 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 firm.

The City has saved hundreds of millions of pounds, and the wholesale butchers and fishmongers will get payouts after decades of competition from bigger suppliers and supermarkets that has squeezed their already meagre margins.

Parliament will have to legislate to end the City’s centuries-old obligation to host markets, a requirement that strengthened the traders’ hand. 

“In a sense, everyone can be a winner here,” said Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics specialising in local government. “The question is, is the loser London as a whole?”

Butchery of another kind

Inside Smithfield, behind the glass display coolers that line the central “buyers walk”, butchers are hard at work with cleavers and saws among the hundreds of hanging carcasses, carving cuts for their clients — who range from local butchers to restaurants, caterers and food trucks. 

White-coated porters, called “bummerees” for reasons somewhat lost to history, heft boxes and clear plastic bags full of hunks of meat. One wheels a shopping cart stacked with pallets of Red Bull to fuel the nocturnal operation. 

Their departure from this spot 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 hosted livestock trading as early as the 12th century. 

The area also saw butchery of another kind. William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield. Wat Tyler, leader of the 14th century Peasants’ Revolt, was another one of many public executions. 

“Awkward uses are more easily placed on edges,” Travers noted. 

By the Victorian era, Smithfield was no longer at the edge of a fast-growing metropolis that had gobbled it up. Driving livestock into the centre of the city brought filth and chaos to the streets. The livestock market closed in the 1850s, and by 1868 the massive new Victorian meat market — with its vaulted ceiling and intricate, painted ironwork — opened for trading. 

Once supplied by underground trains, the market continued to evolve with technology. The first frozen shipment of meat arrived in London from Australia in 1880. By 1913, three-quarters of the meat sold came refrigerated from overseas, 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 years, Hanlon said. Postwar changes to trade, and the rise of supermarkets, led to a “pretty dramatic decline from the late 1960s”, he added. 

Traders and butchers predict the closure of Smithfield will mean even fewer independent sellers feeding London. 

“It is quite catastrophic for us. A lot of the small farmers may end up stopping their deliveries to London because they won’t have that central location to drop off,” said Tony Hindhaugh, co-owner of The Parson’s Nose butcher in Fulham, which sends buyers to Smithfield nightly. 

Smithfield serves as a key centre for butchery. Fewer butcher shops now take whole carcasses, because their customers only want certain cuts. Smithfield’s wholesale butchers divide up the animals and sell them to retailers, depending on cuisines and price points demanded by their clientele. 

“Cheaper cuts are the ones that will suffer,” said Hindhaugh. “All of a sudden those cuts that were cheap won’t be cheap any more. Because distribution is extortionate . . . Wholesale margins are pitiful and getting more and more pitiful.” 

The loss of Smithfield also means less choice.

“It is just a knife in the side of smaller businesses. The bigger distribution companies will be rubbing their hands with glee,” said Nick Allen, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association.

“As a restaurant, you lose the individuality. It will be the same meat as the restaurant up the road.” 

A cohort of City officials and some market traders, who championed the new site at Dagenham, are disappointed that the corporation is giving up on running markets, and that the traders took the money to go quietly. 

“[Markets are] an important part of the array of services the corporation offers their communities,” wrote Henry Pollard, chair of the City’s markets board, in a letter to fellow city councillors, objecting to the closure. 

“Why are we paying an unquantified amount to one stakeholder group? There is over £300mn of additional cost towards paying the Smithfield and Billingsgate tenants — agreed by the Tenants Association representatives and not all tenants — which has not been detailed or widely scrutinised,” he wrote.

Some City grandees believe the market was the victim of overspending on its other construction projects, and that the new market could have been built for less.

“I don’t believe we have looked at all the options,” said Catherine McGuinness, former policy chair at the corporation.

The payment to the traders could amount to more than £3mn per firm on average, depending on how it is ultimately split. 

The Smithfield traders’ association did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment. Lyons said the Billingsgate traders were aiming to stick together and use the money and three years’ grace to find a new landlord. 

“You’re going to get a few people who retire. If they are 65 and cop a couple million quid, they live a good life for the rest of their years on this earth,” he said. “And those of us who want to keep trading will cop a few bob and keep trading.” 

Many Smithfield workers also hope to find a new home. “Hopefully we all end up in a warehouse somewhere, together,” said Sharron Terry, who sells poultry at one of the stalls. “It’s a close-knit community.” 

A unique location

The loss of individuality in the capital’s meat supply will be mirrored by the loss of a unique location, where different groups of Londoners were thrown together. 

“It is this pretty large space in central London that is on a whole different rhythm, and whole different timeframe . . . that will be lost for sure,” said Hanlon.

Edmund Weil ran a late-night bar beneath 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 departure alongside the poultry traders and recently reopened near Covent Garden. 

In the old pub, he said, butchers ending their shift sat alongside bankers and ravers finishing all-nighters. “You’d see maybe a few people from Fabric [nightclub] and a few City traders drinking their Guinness and having a fry up,” he said. 

But on this bitterly cold morning no one is drinking at the Fox & Anchor, which still opens at 7am when market trading winds up. As light creeps into the sky, the first commuters and early morning joggers pass by. Some of the picturesque life of Smithfield, it seems, is already fading. 

“Things have changed over the years,” said Lyons. “There is no more Fleet Street any more. There are no docks any more. It’s all apartments and that . . . It was inevitable.”