The long and bloody history of Smithfield Market

When the City of London Corporation recently voted to withdraw financial support for Smithfield Market, it inspired an online petition to ‘Protect Our Heritage’ and declarations in the British press that the soul of London has been butchered. At stake, say the market’s defenders, is a living legacy of animal trade that began in the area more than 1,000 years ago, and the site of a rich seam of British history in which food, politics, economics and national identity were often intertwined. But this isn’t the first time Smithfield Market has been abolished. The history of the site is one of radical change as well as continuity, encompassing major shifts in British notions of justice, taste, hygiene and civic order.

Dating back to a 1327 charter issued by Edward II, Smithfield is the oldest meat market in London, its proximity to the River Fleet and to grazing sources making it a handy place to bring livestock to trade. Even in the medieval era, animals were trotting to the site from as far away as the Midlands; by the 16th century, cattle drovers were linking Wales and Scotland to Smithfield. In the 1720s, Daniel Defoe declared Smithfield ‘the greatest [market] in the world; no description can be given of it, no calculation of the numbers of creatures sold there, can be made’. That said, well over a million animals per year (mostly sheep) were arriving at Smithfield by the end of the 18th century.

A Bird’s Eye View of Smithfield Market, Taken from the Bear & Ragged Staff (1811) by John Bluck after Thomas Rowlandson; print published by Rudolph Ackermann. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It isn’t only animal blood that has been spilt at the site. The City has a notably bloody past, both historic and folkloric – think of Mrs Lovett’s ‘meat pies’, Jack the Ripper and a whole host of Penny Dreadfuls – but much of the violence enacted at Smithfield was of the state-sanctioned variety. ‘The Elms’ at Smithfield is the oldest execution site in London; William Wallace, aka Braveheart, was hanged, drawn and quartered there in 1305, and Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, was beheaded at the Elms that year. As at Tyburn Tree, the infamous gallows spot in what is now Marble Arch, executions were major public events at Smithfield. Whatever the day’s (often bloody) use of the space was, the area would go on to be recorded in cultural accounts over the centuries as one of sensory overload; the narrator of Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) describes Smithfield as ‘a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses’.

All this tumult led to significant changes in the identity of the site during the Victorian era. In 1852, the Smithfield Market Removal Act was passed, prompting the live cattle market to be relocated to Copenhagen Fields in Islington. Three years later, the wild and woolly Bartholomew Fair was closed for good: having brought cloth trading and all manner of revelry to Smithfield since 1133, it was now judged a threat to public order. A growing sense of censoriousness brought Smithfield into contempt for all its noise and stink, and when London’s underground transit system was extended to Farringdon in 1863, it seemed further evidence of Victorian Britain’s desire to move some of the hubbub of economic activity out of sight for good.

Cartoon depicting men, women and children among the stalls of the Bartholomew Fair (c. 1800), unknown artist. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Smithfield may have a messy history, but it is also home to a number of centuries-old professional guilds. The Worshipful Company of Butchers has been headquartered at Bartholomew Close since its inception in around 975, its members often heavily involved in City politics – including opposition to the Removal Act of 1852. The Butchers is the only historic trade organisation to remain active as such at Smithfield; other Livery Companies, such as the Worshipful Company of Poulters, live on as charitable institutions, though the Worshipful Company of Woolmen still runs an annual sheep drive over the Thames that dates back more than a millennium. (The actor Damian Lewis, a Freeman of the City, took part earlier this year.)

Smithfield also has a central place in the history of animal welfare law. The clergyman Arthur Broome, who helped found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA) 200 years ago this year, personally paid for inspectors to monitor animal abuse at the market. Smithfield was frequently invoked as an urgent reason to reform laws around livestock: the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822 (commonly known as ‘Martin’s Act’ after its chief proponent, Richard Martin), which aimed to prevent ‘the cruel and improper treatment of cattle’ and is often cited as the first piece of animal rights legislation in the world, arose in part from animal abuse at Smithfield, and was fleshed out over the years in the wake of abuses that took place at the site.

A hand-coloured copperplate engraving of a drover driving cattle and sheep to Smithfield Market, from The World in Miniature: England, Scotland and Ireland (1827) by William Henry Pyne, published by Ackermann. Photo: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The market may be soon to close, but the neighbouring Smithfield Rotunda Garden and its sculpted bench, engraved with quotes from animal rights activists, will remain. Just next door, Barts, the world’s oldest hospital, isn’t going anywhere, its very name carrying echoes of Smithfield’s past: Saint Bartholomew, a victim of flaying, is the patron saint of butchers. The Victorian iron and cement structures – by Horace Jones, who also designed Billingsgate fish market, which was marked for closure in the same Corporation vote – will also stay. Some of the disused buildings in the complex are already being refurbished to house the London Museum’s permanent galleries. But whether a museum can come close to capturing the blood, guts and sheer drama of Smithfield and its history remains to be seen.

Smithfield Market in 1956. Photo: Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images