11 December 2025

For the chop: an elegy to London’s Smithfield meat market

Soon, there will be no men left to whizz past you with shopping trolleys full of uncooked ribs

All photos from the series “Smithfield Night Market” by Orland Gili

Three pigs lined up peacefully in a row, closed eyes, pink skin, cartoonish snouts. You would be forgiven for thinking they are sleeping, if it were not for the fact that their detached spines sit in the glass cabinet beside them, and, further to the left, their thighs, shins and trotters. It’s almost cute – Peppa Pig, laid to rest, finally. And then flogged to enterprising restaurateurs ready to confit, sauté, braise, sear, fillet and mince for hungry Londoners.

I am at Smithfield meat market in the City of London, and it is approaching 2am – slinging carcasses of lamb and giant bags of “diced legs” is an insomniac’s game. It might be the surround sound – that constant electric hum – or it could be the effect of seeing your breath hang in the air (a welcome reminder of life in this souk of death). Whatever it is, it does not take long to work out that you are standing in a giant multi-acre refrigerator in Zone 1. Around 48 traders line the galleys of this iron-wrought Victorian super-fridge – just over 100 fewer than during the market’s interwar heyday.

Soon, there will be no men left to whizz past you with shopping trolleys full of uncooked ribs. Last year, the City of London Corporation – which owns the market – voted to close it down. The City has better uses for the site, and the traders have more economical places to be: London is a financial-services economy run by hedge-funders in Canali and their lackeys in TM Lewin, neither of whom has much need for ox tongues and diced legs. But both groups will certainly have an eye on super-prime London real estate.

So the market will relocate to the Royal Docks in the East End – and with it, all those “countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers and vagabonds” of Charles Dickens’s imagination. Banished, they will seek mercantile romance in the shadow of the Excel centre, or hawk calves’ brains alongside Richard Osman novels at the City Airport’s WHSmith. The men in white coats smeared with animal flesh blame, in no particular order, the congestion charge (introduced in 2003), the Ultra Low Emission Zone (2019), Sadiq Khan (1970-present) and the ten-miles-an-hour speed limit on St John Street, the market’s approach road (October 2025).

This pincer movement – of anti-pollution policy and the arrival of all these new PowerPoint factories – has made the change inevitable. The few customers who remain no longer see the financial logic of the set-up: “Twenty-five pounds just to get here, before they’ve even bought anything,” Greg Lawrence of G Lawrence’s Meat huffs. He’s been working here for 30 years; his dad for 57. They used to trade well into the morning – now it’s a ghost town by 5am. “It was a city within a city,” he says, “and now look!” I look, and he is right: Smithfield is more dead zoo than bustling metropole.

But this is not the first time the site has been remade by the relentless trudge of modernity. It was a livestock market from 1328 until the 1850s, back when Smithfield was still a field on London’s peripheries – perfectly accommodating for Peppa and friends. Then the city grew, swallowed the site, and all those live animals became a nuisance to the newly minted cosmopolitans, their cloven hooves leaving pavements “nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire”. The dead were easier to handle, and so the meat market replaced it, and a different kind of trader moved in.

It is 3 am now, and I read: “Food not to be consumed within shop area.” This is a directive that does not need to exist on the walls of Smithfield; there is nothing that makes one want to eat less than an Everest of raw chicken. Bigger carcasses hang by their feet, in their hundreds, as if the place were a vast boxing gym. And that rhythmic thud of butchers’ knives through shoulder joints becomes almost comforting. But here we have, again, a Smithfield at odds with the new sensibilities of the cityscape. (I wouldn’t wear a pair of Church’s here, either).

The first thing you notice as you walk up to the market along Cowcross Street is the fast-casualness of it all. On your left, a Leon serves “supergreen falafel bowls” and “grilled halloumi wraps” to the nine-to-fivers. Up ahead, Gail’s picks up the Leon overspill. The plant-based, dairy-free “milk” conglomerate Oatly – try explaining that to Dickens – is headquartered on this street. Smithfield is hemmed in: by financiers in the skyscrapers half a kilometre south-east, and by creative yuppies immediately to its north. Suffocated.

If the butchery, raw meat and offal are symbolic of anything – an arcane, kill-and-cook sensibility – then Smithfield’s departure marks the final de-masculinisation of London’s professional landscape. Harry, down at Abbijoe (a troubling portmanteau of abattoir), is 72 and will not go with the herd when they relocate to the Royal Docks. Keith of Reeve & Co, who has traded here for 42 years, will. Everyone agrees it’s a shame; everyone is resigned to the necessity. Most think it’ll work just fine (“we’re entrepreneurs”). “Nothing lasts forever,” Greg says. The stench of death is a heavy-handed backdrop metaphor for an otherwise sanguine remark.

Dickens’s London has long left us, mostly for the better: the mire, the sludge, the tuberculosis, the scarlet fever. But whatever remains of it will migrate to the Royal Docks – as central London trades meat cleavers for laptops – unmoored from its 850-year-deep roots. Zone 1, finally stripped of all that sinew and gristle.

[Further reading: Welcome to the supermarket class war]