Five... moments from the history of Smithfield Market
Paying homage to Horace Jones's 'cathedral of meat'
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter…
This edition’s a tiptoe around Smithfield meat market's bloodsoaked history, prompted by the news this week that the plans (in the works for several years) to move Smithfield market out of Farringdon to a megamarket site in Dagenham are, for now, on hold.
Quick refresher: a livestock market was established around 800 years ago where Smithfield meat market now stands, in the Square Mile. Construction of the present-day covered meat market on the site started in the 1860s (designed by architect Horace Jones, also responsible for Tower Bridge), the livestock market having by then moved to Islington.
In recent years there’s been a plan afoot to move Smithfield market from its current location to a new megamarket site further east, combining it with Billingsgate fish market and New Spitalfields fruit and veg market.
But the move, intended for 2027-2028, now seems to be on hiatus, following a pretty vague announcement from the City of London that sounds like they’ll be exploring other longterm options.
A Victorian ‘cathedral of meat’
Surely most of the market’s nightly tourists (ie anybody not visiting for wholesale trade) are, like me, there as much for the architecture as for the meatbuying. It’s a properly extraordinary structure, but the parts of it you can access as a casual visitor today are just a fraction of the world it once was — in the late 1800s, operating almost as a city within the City, with the huge, high-ceilinged, grand-columned buildings in the complex (including the Central Meat Market, General Market and Poultry Market) serviced by a similarly huge underground network of tunnels and cavernous basements underneath, connecting to the railway routes that webbed through London. Tapping into the railway network meant freight trains running on the Metropolitan line were passing right under the market halls, and Jones’s design folded in underground cold stores to receive the meat in vast quantities and hydraulic lifts to transport it up to the market floor.
Sidenote: part of the structure, the original Poultry Market building, was destroyed by a major fire in 1958. When it was completed in 1963 the new building was an engineering marvel, with the (at the time) largest clear spanning dome roof in Europe (there’s an excellent article by C20 Society covering some of the challenges faced in building the concrete shell structure and why it was such an ambitious project).
It was (nearly) home to a WW2 aircraft carrier made of ice
‘The domes of Smithfield Market are the tips of an iceberg. Built by the Victorians to keep produce cool in airy colonnades, cold stores which burrowed deep underground were later added to the market. But during the war, a lot of meat arrived off-the-bone, compacted in the form of corned beef and spam to save shipping space. The cold stores, no longer needed, were left empty and ready for other uses.’
So Laurence Scales tells us in his Londonist article ‘How an aircraft carrier made from ice was designed deep below Smithfield’ — exploring Project Habakkuk, a period in the market’s WW2 history where its underground caverns were home to an incredibly ambitious project. Although it’s worth going deeper into the surreal story via the article, the tl;dr: the wartime Combined Operations HQ came up with a plan to bridge the mid-Atlantic gap, a section of the ocean where UK ships were especially vulnerable because of the distance from land and the lack of short-range aircraft to run interference for them.