Smithfield Market: London's Great Meat Market and Its Victorian Hall

What Is Smithfield Market?

Smithfield Market is London's historic wholesale meat market, in the City of London near Farringdon. Its Victorian market halls, built of iron, glass and cement, are among the best-known food buildings in Britain. Writers at Apollo magazine on the long history of Smithfield trace the market back to a 1327 charter issued by Edward II, the earliest documented basis for calling it London's oldest meat market.

Live Cattle at Smithfield

Before the Victorian halls, Smithfield was a livestock market. Animals were driven to the site from as far away as the Midlands in the medieval period. Daniel Defoe wrote in the 1720s that no calculation of the numbers sold there could be made, and by the end of the eighteenth century well over a million animals a year, mostly sheep, were arriving.

Charles Dickens described the scene in Oliver Twist in 1838 as a stunning and bewildering one that confounded the senses. The crowding and filth of live animals in the middle of the city drew growing complaint, which led Parliament to act.

Why the Live Market Moved

The Smithfield Market Removal Act of 1852 led to the live cattle trade moving to Copenhagen Fields in Islington. In 1855 Bartholomew Fair was closed permanently. The new site opened as the Metropolitan Cattle Market, and Smithfield then concentrated on dead meat.

The change turned Smithfield from a place where animals were bought alive into a place where carcasses arrived by rail and were sold by the wholesale trade.

Horace Jones and the 1868 Meat Market

The City's architect, Horace Jones, designed the new building, as he did Billingsgate fish market. A nineteenth-century description reproduced on British History Online, The Metropolitan Meat-Market, says the opening ceremony took place in November 1868 with a banquet in the central roadway.

The market was a parallelogram 631 feet long and 246 feet wide, covering about three and a half acres, with a central avenue 27 feet wide, six side avenues and about 162 shops. The basement was designed as a through railway station, with links to the Metropolitan, Midland, London, Chatham and Dover, and Great Western railways, and hydraulic lifts were planned to raise arriving meat to the market floor.

The Poultry Market and the Wider Complex

A separate poultry and game market was planned just west of the meat market and designed in harmony with its architecture. A bay at the east end of the meat market also handled game and poultry. Together these buildings formed the Smithfield complex that visitors know today.

The ironwork, the big roof and the shop layout were meant to show that a meat market could be clean, orderly and well run, a point Victorian reformers cared about. General background is also in the Wikipedia article on Smithfield Market.

Smithfield Today

The Apollo article reports that the City of London Corporation voted to withdraw financial support for the market and that it is set to close, a decision opposed by petitions and press reaction. It also says the Victorian structures will remain, and that some disused buildings are being refurbished to house the permanent galleries of the London Museum. Readers should check current news for the market's latest status.

For more on beef and meat trading history, see the agribusiness section of farm.FM and a farm.FM story about the history of the London meat trade.