BARRY LEWIS for TIME

lifeblood Early-morning shift workers at London's Smithfield market; meat has been traded on the site since the 12th century

BARRY LEWIS for TIME

meat and drink Workers enjoy an early-morning pint

The Sacred Heart Of The City

Smithfield has been a meat market for almost 1,000 years. It's still the best place in London to find the marvelous, the mundane and the miraculous

By PETER ACKROYD

Smithfield Market, London

Print Safe Email This Subscribe

The journey to Smithfield Meat Market has, for the Londoner, the characteristics of a pilgrimage. It is not a place generally visited by tourists, but it represents the sacred heart of the city. It is London's heart in a literal sense, since it is the viscous center where flesh in various forms has been sold for almost 1,000 years.

If you now approach the Victorian edifice from St. John Street, to the north of the market's 10 acres, you are approaching the latest incarnation of a trading center that began life at least as early as the 12th century. Then it was known as the "smooth-field" where horses were sold, but even at that early date cattle and pigs were kept in pens for prospective buyers. Then, by degrees, it was used to hold pigs, sheep and other animals, all of them butchered on the spot and sold steaming. This was the quarter that Charles Dickens, in Great Expectations, described as "the shameful place" of "filth and fat and blood and foam."

But in London, the sacred and the profane are never far apart. The shambles of Smithfield are a few yards away from a building that was once known as "the gate of heaven." If you walk through Grand Avenue, the aptly named thoroughfare through the middle of the market, you will cross Long Lane and come into West Smithfield. Less than 10 m further southward, you will find the church of St. Bartholomew the Great. From its foundation in the early 12th century, it has been the site of many miracles. Edward the Confessor, in a prophetic dream, was informed that Smithfield had been chosen by God as the place for His worship. In the oratory of the church, the Virgin Mary appeared to a lay brother, and declared that those who prayed in this place would be vouchsafed "mercy and blessing for ever." This holiness was within sight, and sound, of the largest abattoir in England.

The greatness of London lies in small patches of sacred territory — enchanted ground where the living and the dead still walk together

Smithfield has been a cruel place in more than one sense. If you leave the churchyard of St. Bartholomew and look over the circular space of West Smithfield in front of you, you will see, a couple of meters away, a public lavatory. This, curiously enough, is the place where the Catholic and Protestant martyrs of the 16th century were tied to a post and burned to death. Where the lambs were butchered, the lambs of God expired. On this spot, too, the leader of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, Wat Tyler, was stabbed and badly wounded by the Lord Mayor, before being beheaded. This has always been one of the dark places of the earth.

TOP Go To Top

In woodcuts of the 16th century, there are images of the burning victims of religious persecution, surrounded by flames, with the wooden stalls of the interested observers in the background. Those stalls were erected against the walls of an ancient hospice that survives still. The hospital of St. Bartholomew is the oldest in London, and was established in 1123 for the sick and infirm of the city. If any tourists should by chance venture here, they will find two paintings by William Hogarth hanging beside the central staircase.

Smithfield is a marvel of London because it contains the whole urban world in miniature. It is a shining crystal of myriad forms, each one of them reflecting a facet of London life. The area of West Smithfield itself, for example, was the arena for an annual fair that lasted for 700 years. Bartholomew Fair took place in the large open area between the market and hospital, and was from the beginning a venue for lust and extravagance of every sort. It stretched along Cock Lane, known for its prostitutes, and along Pie Corner, known for its meat puddings. The narrow streets are still in place.

Ben Jonson's play, Bartholomew Fair, is an accurate depiction of the general energy and excess of the 14-day festival. As one of his characters puts it, "Bless me! Deliver me, help, hold me! The Fair!" In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was a place of freak shows and pantomime, of conjuring tricks and acrobats, of what would now be called fast food and even faster drink. The association with the meat market was to be found in the famous sausages sold at the fair. The area around Smithfield is now famous for its restaurants.

There is another element of Smithfield cruelty associated with Cock Lane. There was a public house on the corner of that small street, called The Fortune of War. It was the tavern in which the "resurrection men," or body snatchers, used to assemble to bargain with their clients — the anatomy professors who lectured at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The bodies were "snatched" from cemeteries of the neighborhood. Flesh, hot or cold, has always been served here.

BARRY LEWIS for TIME

LANDMARK Cock Lane, once notorious for prostitution

So Smithfield is a true marvel, a surviving miracle of London life, a heterogeneous human wonder of cruelty and piety, spectacle and sickness, that still comprises a market, a church and a hospital. The greatness of London lies not in its buildings or in its "sights," but in these small patches of sacred territory — enchanted ground where the living and the dead still walk together. The magic of London resides in this genius loci, or spirit of place. If you wish to understand this city, then it is necessary to explore Smithfield.

TOP Go To Top

Peter Ackroyd is the author of London: The Biography

<< previous :: 1 :: 2 :: next >>

FROM THE JULY 4/11, 2005 DOUBLE ISSUE OF TIME EUROPE MAGAZINE; POSTED SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2005.