Sham urbanity dispatches Smithfield to the knacker’s yard

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The writer is the FT’s architecture and design critic

Markets are theatrical places. There is a choreography of supply and sale, a dramatic language of shouts and signs, traditions of display and aesthetics, of costume, class and heritage. They are an entire culture in themselves. In London the last vestige of that culture is Smithfield, a glass-encased Victorian megastructure populated by blood-smeared, white-coated figures with an audience of slaughtered, suspended beasts. Huge trucks suckle at the cold store doors and the place comes alive at ungodly hours, the dead of night when the City is sleeping.  

Smithfield is the last unconfected remnant of the City’s history as a real city, a visceral place of everyday, round-the-clock life. It is about to end. The City of London’s decision to abandon the 900-year-old market, and a proposal to move it to Dagenham, is a shocking, short-sighted affair that will strip the City of its identity and make it yet more blandly generic.  

Like Billingsgate fish market, turfed out of its riverside site in 1982 to a Poplar traffic island (the original building sits dumbly and mostly empty), Smithfield is being sacrificed. The City no longer wants to think about trade on anything beyond a screen.  

This bombshell coincided with the news this week that John Jobbagy, the last meat trader in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, accepted an offer from his landlords to vacate so that the building could be redeveloped. The Meatpacking District, once home to slaughterhouses and cold storage plants, is now a place of fashion, art and high-end real estate investment. It used to host some of New York’s weirdest, wildest clubs and bars as the meatpacking industry declined and huge, cheap spaces were there for the taking.  

In London, club culture, design and food converged on the streets around Smithfield. The market’s crepuscular hours, cold storage spaces (insulated for noise) and iron smell of blood in the air deterred developers but were perfect for clubs. Before that, architects adapted industrial spaces as offices and lofts, then ceded the way to advertising and design agencies. Fergus Henderson spotted an old smokehouse on St John Street and turned it into the meat-and-offal heavy St John, a revered restaurant. Such changes reflected the confluence of market and industry, the way the presence of meat devalued the neighbourhood, making experimentation possible, rentals affordable and industrial-scale space abundant.  

Cities evolve, of course, but residential and commercial use stymies change as rich residents and landlords object to anything disruptive. Smithfield was once the site of the Bartholomew Fair, the popular bacchanalia that so upset the Victorians that they put this glass palace of dismemberment above it. It was also the site of public executions (William Wallace was disembowelled here and Wat Tyler beheaded). 

The butchers themselves will ultimately be dispersed with no future provision.  There is an insulting disregard for their skill, solidarity and history, for trade and civic pride. I cannot help but think class plays a role too. The meat porters with their pubs and caffs are of a world remembered but little respected. The rich local authority once hired Sir Horace Jones to build Smithfield, Billingsgate and Leadenhall Markets as well as Tower Bridge. Just look at the architecture and weep that we cannot even imagine building such things today.  

Part of the site is being made into a new Museum of London, undermining the actual culture of a commercial city with the institutional culture of the museum. The biggest failure is that another part of living London will turn into a simulacrum of urbanity, a place for lunch inhabited by food trucks with ironic retro-Smithfield names. That move will slowly kill everything around it as prices rise and Smithfield becomes another sorry site like that other once great market, Covent Garden, a place few Londoners will ever willingly visit.