[Originally published in
London Essays, June 2016]
At seven o’clock on a drizzly April morning, Canary Wharf is just
coming to life. Bankers, brokers and lawyers stream up from the station,
ready for a new day of trading and deal-making. But in a low-slung
yellow building just north of the gleaming towers, the working day is
nearing its end.
Inside Billingsgate Market, traders in long white coats and
wellington boots are chatting among themselves as they start to hose
down their stalls. Polystyrene boxes packed with seafood glisten under
bright fluorescent lights. The market is not as busy at it was earlier
but customers still circulate: trade suppliers are keenly comparing
prices and quantities alongside a diverse selection of retail browsers –
a couple of Orthodox Jews, a Coptic Christian priest, Chinese families,
bearded foodies.
There’s fish here from all round the British Isles: from Aberdeen and
Grimsby, Brixham and the Shetland Isles, Whitstable and Lowestoft:
coley and cod, sea bream and salmon, tiger-striped mackerel and scallops
in the shell. Other stalls specialise in ‘exotics’ – species of fish
from faraway oceans, many of which I have barely heard of, let alone
eaten: redfish, milkfish, catfish, kingfish, needle fish, barracuda,
croaker, tilapia, frozen breezeblocks of squid.
Billingsgate, which moved to Docklands in 1982, is the biggest fish
market in the UK; 25,000 tonnes of fish a year, almost 100 tonnes a day,
pass through on the way from sea to plate. Lorries arrive from 9pm
until the starting bell rings at 4am, bringing seafood from UK fishing
ports, from airports, from the cargo docks where frozen fish from the
South Pacific and Indian Ocean is unloaded. The consignments are split
between the 98 stands in the centre of the market and the 30 shops that
line its edges, or sent to a freezer store the size of a football pitch
at the back of the market.
Billingsgate is one of London’s five wholesale food markets. The
Western International Market at Southall, New Covent Garden at Vauxhall,
and New Spitalfields at Leyton all supply fruit and veg; Smithfield
meat market remains on its historic site in Farringdon. Three of these –
Billingsgate, New Spitalfields and Smithfield – are operated by the
Corporation of London, which was granted exclusive rights to operate
markets around the City of London in 1327. The Corporation estimates
that their three markets handle nearly 900,000 tonnes of fish, meat,
fruit and vegetables every year, and turn over nearly £1bn (though
traders are cautious about disclosing precise figures that might lead to
rent rises).
London’s streets may never have been paved with gold but they were
always dotted with market stalls and filled with food. Shifting patterns
of food production, trading and consumption have shaped the city, as
much as struggles between church and state, nobles and merchants,
industry and commerce.
London’s place names tell this story: Milk Street and Bread Street;
Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of London started; Eel Pie Island.
Sometimes the old names have been erased: Old Fish Street no longer runs
down to Billingsgate; and More London (the development by London Bridge
that includes City Hall) eschewed the waterfront walkway’s old name,
Pickle Herring Street – a salty reflection of Bermondsey’s history of
food processing – opting for the stately The Queen’s Walk instead.
Meanwhile, London’s markets have been transformed. In
London: the Biography, Peter Ackroyd describes the street market that formed the spine of the medieval City of London. You
can trace the route down Cheapside today, from the bloody shambles
of livestock and butchery at Smithfield, outside the city walls at
Newgate (near the end of Holborn Viaduct today) to Poultry (the name is
self-explanatory) and Cornhill, where vegetables, meat and fish were
traded from what would later become the Royal Exchange, the foundation
of London’s stock market. South of the Royal Exchange, on the banks
of the Thames, Billingsgate was so ancient that the origins of its name
are unknown, though it was granted a charter in 1400.
Until the Thames was overwhelmed with industrial and domestic waste,
eels and other fish came directly from the river: as the city grew, the
River Roding at Barking became home to Britain’s largest fishing fleet.
There are records of a fleet at Barking from the 11th century, as Andrew
Summers and John Debenham set out in
London’s Metropolitan Essex. By
1700, boats would venture to Iceland, and by the 19th century the fleet
was 200-strong, their catch cooled by ice harvested in the winter from
flooded marshes. From 1850, decline set in, as the railways made remote
northern ports quickly accessible by land, and street names like Whiting
Avenue are all that preserve the memory of Barking’s seafaring heyday.
The arrival of the railways was pivotal for London’s food supply and
urban development. Beforehand, most of London’s food was grown on its
doorstep. In 1796, Daniel Lysons’ survey of the suburbs estimated
that there were 5,000 acres (the same area as the Royal Parks) of
market gardens within 12 miles of the metropolis, plus 1,700 acres of
potato fields and 800 acres of fruit trees. Barges brought manure from
London’s stables to feed the soil and returned food to the city’s
markets. Ackroyd writes of “cabbages from Battersea and onions from
Deptford, celery from Chelsea and peas from Charlton, asparagus from
Mortlake and turnips from Hammersmith”. The railways untethered
London’s growth from its geography by dramatically extending supply
lines: the population was no longer constrained by the availability of
food within a few miles of the city, and the market gardens of the
suburbs could make way for housing.
One walled market garden, between the City and Westminster, served
the convent and abbey at Westminster. Covent Garden was seized by Henry
VIII in the dissolution of the monasteries and granted to the earls of
Bedford. In the following century, the 4th Earl began developing the
land, with Inigo Jones designing the arcaded piazza and St Paul’s Church
– a prototype garden suburb for prosperous Londoners. For a period
the area flourished, but in time, Roy Porter writes, “the fruit and
vegetable market also operating in the square sapped its smartness and
the aristocracy quit, migrating to Mayfair”.
Covent Garden slid into seediness, but the fruit and vegetables
market flourished particularly after 1666, when the Great Fire destroyed
the City’s markets. In Victorian times, with new market halls in place,
the market boasted 1,000 porters. In
1974 the market relocated to Vauxhall, after an epic battle between
conservationists who wanted to preserve the old buildings and the
Greater London Council, who proposed a comprehensive redevelopment in
the worst traditions of 1970s car-based urbanism.
Every Day But Christmas, Lindsay Anderson’s 1957 documentary about Covent Garden, begins
late at night in the fields of Sussex, where lorries are loaded with
lettuces, mushrooms and roses, and set out through the darkness to
London. The film records the quickening tempo of the market, as
vegetables arrive, then flowers, then porters and customers (including
London’s last female market porter and last flower girls, successors in
trade to Eliza Doolittle), then cleaners and scavengers. The streets are
a jumble of lorries, pallets and people.
Illustration by
Lucinda Rogers
There’s a calm interlude in the film, between the unloading and the
stacking of the produce and the arrival of the customers, where the
market workers retire to a café for a break – a cigarette, a cup of tea
and a bacon roll. They are not the only nighthawks in the café. The
camera lights on a group of gay men, chatting and shooting nervous
glances at the camera (we are still 10 years away from the partial
legalisation of homosexuality), and fixing elaborate coifs. Narrator
Alun Owen intones archly: “Not everybody in Albert’s works in the
market. Some of them, you wonder where they come from.”
Market workers would have been less naïve. Before London’s current
redefinition as a 24-hour city, markets also stood out as permissive
places, where the loud and the louche mingled with the traders who kept
the city fed. As well as being a place of butchery and executions,
medieval Smithfield was the location of St Bartholemew’s Fair,
a notorious three-day debauch that ran for 700 years before being
suppressed in the 1850s. In modern times, too, markets and nightlife
enjoyed a curious co-existence: as in the Meatpacking District in New
York, Smithfield and Vauxhall became hubs for clubbing, away from the
potentially censorious gaze of London’s daytime population.
20 years ago, says David Smith, Director of Markets and Consumer
Protection at City of London Corporation, wholesale markets looked like a
spent force, a relic from a pre-modern era. Supermarkets were
establishing their own supply chains and their own warehouses on the
edge of London; the wholesale markets’ niche would only become narrower.
In 2002 and 2007, reports recommended the slimming down of London’s
markets, proposing that Billingsgate and Smithfield be closed and their
business consolidated to New Spitalfields and/or New Covent Garden.
These plans foundered in the complexity of legislation and commercial
interests, but then the wholesale trade experienced a revival: today,
the Corporation’s markets are fully occupied and returning a small
surplus. Three factors threw the markets a lifeline: one was London’s
phenomenal boom in dining out, encompassing everything from opulent
Michelin aspirants to inventive street food pop-ups. A city whose food
had traditionally served as the butt of other people’s jokes became one
of the world’s great dining destinations.
Another factor was immigration: supermarkets work at scale but the
choice they offer is heavily circumscribed. ‘International food’ aisles
have been outpaced by the growth in specialist suppliers of everything
from Chinese greens to curry leaves to Polish sausage to pomfret. At
Billingsgate alone, ‘exotics’ are now reckoned to make up 40 per cent of
turnover. New Londoners have revitalised the city’s markets as well as
its cuisine.
The third factor was a change in food-buying culture and a resurgence
of middle-class interest in authenticity and provenance. The markets
increasingly operate at the edge of mainstream consumption, providing
specialities for minority cuisines and exquisite ingredients for
epicureans, as well as acting as a secondary market for produce that is
just a little too gnarly and imperfect for the supermarkets’ exacting
aesthetic standards.
But the irony of London’s voracious appetite, for land as much as for
food, is that the city is forever devouring its edge, driving markets
and other food services further from the centre. Rational planning
pushed Covent Garden, Billingsgate and Spitalfields out of central
London, narrowing their focus to wholesale trade and relocating it to
fringe industrial areas, but today these locations – alongside the
massive redevelopment of Vauxhall, next to Canary Wharf’s new Crossrail
Station and at the edge of London’s Olympic Park – are far from
peripheral. Yesterday’s remote trading outpost is today’s property
hotspot.
The City of London Corporation’s Markets Committee have asked for
another strategic review, and at Billingsgate rumours of relocation
abound. Moving to New Spitalfields is still discussed as one option, but
space there is short; relocation to a new facility in Barking is
another possibility. Meanwhile, at New Covent Garden (currently owned by
central government), a joint venture is in place to build a new 500,000
square-foot market, together with 3,000 homes and 135,000 square feet
of offices.
Curiously, the market that feels most secure is Smithfield, which has
occupied the same site for the best part of a millennium. As London
grew around the livestock market, Smithfield became increasingly
controversial, not just for what one Victorian campaigner described as
the “cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language,
danger, disgusting and shuddering sights” of the market itself, but also
thanks to the chaos caused by driving animals through the narrow
streets. A new cattle market was opened in 1855 in Islington, and
Smithfield was re-established as a meat market, with carcasses delivered
by underground railway.
The 42 traders at Smithfield today have successfully battled against
redevelopment, the most recent proposal for which was rejected in 2014,
following a public inquiry. The now-disused General Market, alongside
Farringdon Road, is earmarked for the relocation of the Museum of
London, but the Victorian East and West Markets and the 20th century
Poultry Market are all listed, severely limiting the scope for
profitable redevelopment, especially once the costs of relocating
traders are taken into account.
The possible future for London’s wholesale markets is not simply
survival or displacement. Markets could become re-absorbed by the city
in their new locations, rediscovering the mix and urban quality that was
lost in rezoning. The plans for Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea see New
Covent Garden as an essential component of local character, and include
proposals for a new ‘Garden Heart’ of workspaces, with a ‘Food Quarter’
of specialised shops and restaurants alongside it.
The story of London’s wholesale markets is rich in anomaly. Trading
animal carcasses and crates of fish on the doorstep of Europe’s leading
financial centres is certainly a surprising use of prime real estate.
But the markets’ survival should be celebrated, as should their
continuing capacity for reinvention. In a city endlessly seeking
novelty, variety and traceability in its diet, wholesale markets make
visible the sinews and circulatory system of consumption, and draw a
line connecting medieval trade in beasts, fowls and fish with the
complex assets and derivatives that are bought and sold in financial
markets today.
