Blood, sweat and booze are essential to the City’s identity

Plans to redesign Smithfield meat market as a tourist haven will destroy the soul of the site

Smithfield market was once home to the Bartholomew Fair, a raucous event celebrating the end of summer that dates back to 1123

Smithfield is a very corporeal place, a bit of the city that is all about bodies. At its heart is the meat market, the City of London’s last surviving central wholesale market, smelling of steely blood. Around it is a connective tissue of nightclubs, which fill up with swaying bodies at around the same time as the trucks full of carcasses and the meat porters arrive. South is St Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded 12 years after the Battle of Hastings. And the “Smooth Field” was once the site of executions. Hundreds were hanged, burnt or boiled alive there.

But plans to move the meat market to Dagenham and transform the buildings into “a vibrant, exciting and welcoming new destination” as part of the City’s cultural quarter threaten to crush what makes this neighbourhood so special. Smithfield was the perfect place for a night-time neighbourhood because the culture of early-opening pubs and cafés was already in place, residents were sparse and space was plentiful in the cavernous disused cold stores. Clubbers collided with meat porters and junior doctors in the pubs while bankers headed to work outside, it was strange and wonderful.

Of course there are arguments for taking markets out of the centre of cities, real estate is too valuable, traffic gets clogged up, there are pollution and hygiene problems. But what, exactly, has been the fate of markets that have been repurposed?

In London, Covent Garden was saved in the 1970s from planners who wanted to build a conference centre, but when the fruit and vegetable market moved out the space was turned into a tourist trap which no real Londoner would go anywhere near. Billingsgate fish market, which moved from its City site to the Isle of Dogs in 1982, left its lovely building a husk that is now underused as an occasional events space. Or look further afield: New York’s Meat Packing District once throbbed with a similar energy to Smithfield. After the butchers left it became another tourist destination, its canopied streets now designed by upmarket boutiques and hotels.

London has been careless with its markets. The success of Borough Market (albeit reborn as a foodie haven rather than a wholesale site) shows how successful they can be. In other cities the continuity of food markets is acknowledged as a critical component of culture and identity.

Think of the spectacles of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market (which has had its own struggle with relocation) or Seattle’s Pike Place Market with its slightly ridiculous ritual of fish-throwing. Or Budapest’s central market, heaped with paprika and sausages or Mexico City’s garish Mercado San Juan.

No one maintains markets better than the Spanish. Every city has a covered market hall. They are municipally-owned places as pivotal to the identity of their cities as cathedrals and squares.

Barcelona’s Boqueria is often held up as a temple of fresh food but has become so crammed with tourists stopping for Instagram moments that locals have become frustrated. When the city restored the vast Sant Antoni market in 2018 it took steps to discourage gentrification, seeing the market as a social as well as a commercial construct, critical to local identity in this working class barrio.

At Smithfield there is no doubt that the market hall itself, an iron structure designed in 1851 by City architect Horace Jones (who went on to design Tower Bridge) would be a fantastic success as a tourist destination. It is easy to picture its Grand Avenue stuffed with restaurants and pseudo-stalls and pretend-independent shops. The extensive underground cold storage vaults could also be used again.

But the City is already planning a new Museum of London next door and a concert hall nearby with the Barbican arts centre around the corner. Is there not enough culture here? Can we not save a little space for that endangered quantity, meat?

This is about the culture of London itself. The place where the market stands was once the site of the Bartholomew Fair, a raucous event celebrating the end of summer, from 1123 until it was abolished by uptight Victorians who disapproved of its bawdiness and debauchery. That very particular mix of blood, drink and sweat is essential to London’s survival as something more than a tourist simulacrum of a real city.