Billingsgate: So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
Another historic market set to close.
Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine’s Friday edition for paying subscribers (with a generous teaser for everyone else).
In the previous newsletter, I looked at the early history of Smithfield meat market, an institution that might date back to Anglo-Saxon times, but whose remaining years can be counted on the toes of one trotter. The City of London announced recently that the market would be closed forever from 2028. Smithfield got most of the attention. As a central market, most Londoners have walked through it. But the equally historic Billingsgate fish market — now based on the Isle of Dogs but once near London Bridge — also faces the chop. Today’s newsletter looks over its thousand-year history.
But first, the History Radar…
History Radar
Upcoming events of interest to London history fans.
🔔 THE CHIMES: Experience Charles Dickens's lesser-known festive tale The Chimes through a solo performance by James Swanton. The story follows Trotty Veck, a beleaguered messenger who embarks on a mystical journey with the church bells as his guide. Takes place at the Charles Dickens Museum, and full admission to the museum is included with the performance ticket. Begins on 10 December, with shows on other dates this month
🕯️ CHRISTMAS CANDLELIT LATE: Twickenham's Strawberry Hill House stays open late on 11 December for a candlelit Christmas evening. Explore the Gothic castle lit as Horace Walpole intended, decorated with Christmas ornaments. Drinks and mince pies are available.
🎞️ RELICS OF OLD LONDON: On 12 December, the London Archives in Clerkenwell offers a talk about the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, and its striking collection. Between 1875 and 1899, the organisation created an architectural record of buildings, comprising 120 images of buildings under the threat of demolition in a rapidly changing city.
🧑🏻⚕️ CHRISTMAS AT THE MUSEUM: The Florence Nightingale Museum in Lambeth stays open late on 13 December for an evening of Christmas festivities, spanning card-making, choir performances, drinks and mince pies, as well as a chance to view the museum's usual exhibitions and displays about the trailblazing London nurse.
🎶 CHRISTMAS CAROL HISTORY: You can't move without hearing Christmas carols at the moment, but how much do you know about the stories behind them? On 13 December, Southwark Cathedral hosts conductor and lecturer Andrew Gant to reveal the history of Christmas carols, including some surprising facts. Organist James Gough plays snippets of the tunes being discussed.
🎻 WOLF HALL LIVE: Seen the new Wolf Hall series yet? On 13 December, Rough Trade East celebrates the release of the soundtrack to Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light, with a live performance of music from the series, conducted by composer Debbie Wiseman and performed by The Locrian Ensemble. Wiseman also takes part in a Q&A session, to talk about her experience working on the series.
🔎 SHERLOCK HOLMES: On 14 December, Hammersmith's Riverside Studios teams up with the BFI and the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Granada’s Sherlock Holmes TV series, which starred Jeremy Brett. Take a deep-dive into two episodes, The Solitary Cyclist and The Devil's Foot, including a screening of the latter, followed by a Q&A session.
Billingsgate: So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
How many of us shop at Billingsgate? Very few, I’d imagine. Even I’ve never set foot inside the famous fish market, and I’m (a) obsessed with exploring London’s buildings, and (b) the grandson of a Grimsby trawlerman. Everyone is welcome at this monumental icthyomart. But there’s… a catch.
One does not simply walk into Billingsgate. It’s on the right-hand shoulder of the Isle of Dogs, yet cut off from its neighbours by a six-lane highway and a set of aqueous rectangles that were once docks. To reach the gates, you have to spiral round a series of industrial roads, and then negotiate London’s most baffling set of traffic lights:
Those who overcome such obstacles might well find the market closed. Trading hours are 4am to 8am, ideal for “fishmongers, restaurant owners and the like”; not so ideal for random punters.
If you do want to visit Billingsgate fish market, then you’ll need to set sail soon. Along with Smithfield, the market is set to close in 2028. Both markets were planning to move to a new combined site in Dagenham, but not anymore. The City of London Corporation has pulled the plug entirely. In just a few years, Billingsgate — once the largest fish market in the world — will close forever.
It’s more than the end of an era. It’s the end of an epoch. The modern building might resemble an elongated petrol station, canopied in a shade of yellow that went extinct in the 1980s, but the market’s genesis came at the very dawn of London itself. Let’s take a brief trawl through its history (and that, I falteringly promise, is the last of the fishy wordplay).
Ancient origins
Billingsgate has only sat on the Isle of Dogs for a fraction of the market’s history. Until the 1982, it had traded from a wharf just east of London Bridge. It is a site that was known as Billingsgate a thousand years ago, and it retains that name today, even though the market has moved on.
As with Smithfield, the precise origins of Billingsgate are lost to time, but we can make conjectures. A good place to start is the name. The suffix ‘-gate’, in this context, does not imply a controlling structure in the manner of the Bishopsgate or the Aldgate elsewhere in the City. Rather, it indicates a wharf or jetty at the end of a lane. Often, these lanes cut through a surviving section of the Roman river wall, and so they were in some ways analogous to the landlocked gates mentioned above.
There was no “Thames Path” along the shoreline. Medieval Londoners would struggle to spot their river. The Thames could only be glimpsed at the ends of these narrow, private lanes. Billingsgate was one of dozens, including the now-vanished Kingsgate, Wolsiergate and Ebbgate. A handful of these names survive into our own time, including Billingsgate, Dowgate and (in pastiche form along the Thames Path) Oystergate Walk.
The ‘Billing’ part of the name is almost certainly a reference to a real person, presumably a man. He is another “great unknown Londoner” whose name, as proprietor of the wharf, has lived on long beyond any other memory of his existence. The area is noted as Blynesgate, Byllynsgate and other variations before settling on the modern spelling.
When, exactly, did this Billing fellow live? Archaeological evidence1 suggests that the watergates at the eastern end of the City came online in the early-to-mid 11th century — that is, not long before the Norman invasion. The name probably dates from this time.
One thing we can presume about Mr Billing: he was not mono-fixated on fish. The intimate association between Billingsgate and produce of a piscine persuasion did not emerge until Shakespeare’s time. Before then, the wharf had no known speciality. It handled everything from corn to pottery. Fish, too.
By 1327, Billingsgate had grown to become one of London’s most important wharves. In this year, Edward III granted the City of London oversight over the market (which it retains to this day). By 1598, John Stow tells us that Billingsgate was handling “fish, both fresh and salt, shell fishes, salt, Orenges, Onions, and other fruits and rootes, wheate, Rie, and graine of divers sorts, for service of the Citie, and the parts of this Realm adjoyning.” The wharf gradually came to specialise in fish, a trade over which it gained a near monopoly through an Act of 1699.
Billingsgate would become an icon of the City. The fish porters were a ‘London type’, with their unique flat-topped bobbin hats, upon which could be perched crates of fish. Just as renowned were the Billingsgate “fish wives”, whose language was so coarse that ‘billingsgate’ became a synonym for profanity.
The fish get a new home
The market’s heyday came in the Victorian era. Up until the mid-19th century, Billingsgate had traded in a haphazard, ad-hoc way, with numerous stalls crowding around the wharf. In 1850 a “permanent” stone building was constructed to better organise the trade. It proved too small2 and was demolished after just two decades. The replacement building, which still stands today, was another masterpiece by Horace Jones, who also gave us Smithfield Market, Leadenhall Market and Tower Bridge. What a debt we Londoners owe that man.
This second hall was constructed by John Mowlem and Co. It’s a name that always warms my cockles. The firm rescued many fragments of ‘Old London’ through its farsighted shipping habits. Mowlem boats would bring in freshly cut stone from Dorset. On the return journey, the ships would be loaded with rubble from demolished buildings, to serve as ballast. Any old debris would do the job, but Mowlem’s men were instructed to seek out architecturally interesting fragments. Hence, if you ever visit Mowlem’s home port of Swanage, you will find London’s toenail clippings scattered willy-nilly throughout the town. These include, I am pleased to say, this bobby-dazzler of a weather vane taken from the original Billingsgate building: