Photos: Christmas auction at Smithfield's ahead of market’s move East

As Christmas beckons and attention spans shorten, this is a short piece mainly aimed at hosting pictures from Saturday’s (23 Dec 2023) meat auction at London’s #Smithfield #market — one of the last such annual events before it heads to the outer East End in 2027 or 2028.

Moving city centre markets that rely on road transport for both incoming deliveries and restaurateurs leaving with purchased goods make sense in terms of contributing towards #sustainability. It is hard to find figures, but the volume of deliveries would likely mean significant air pollution in a largely residential area close to both the Barbican and St Bartholemew’s Hospital.

As Nicholas Saphir, chair of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, told MPs at an inquiry into London’s wholesale markets some20 years ago, vans at Smithfields at 10am had likely already been to New Billingsgate fish market and New Covent Garden fruit and flower markets. “It does not work in terms of congestion; we have wasted journeys,” he said.

Covent Garden moved decades ago to Battersea, while Billingsgate and New Spitalfields relocated from their inner London locations of Covent Garden and Lower Thames Street and Whitechapel to the Docklands and Leyton, respectively. But these two need to move again due to rising traffic volumes and land values, and in three or four years’ time, the three will share a home of a new 42-acre facility at the former coal port of Dagenham Dock.

While it makes evident environmental sense, there will inevitably be a general but unquantifiable feeling of sadness and loss that an iconic institution that has been part of the city and its same location for 800 years will move. The fact that similar markets in London and other cities — with the exception of Covent Garden — have tended to become anonymous retail or business areas.

This has been the case in other towns such as in New York City when the  Meatpacking District became an upmarket designer emporium while Tsukiji fish market, which relocated in October 2018 is likely to become a convention centre, hotels, and other facilities by the 2040s.

Paris’s Les Halles Market stopped being a popular all-night pit stop — as Smithfield still is with its pubs with early house licences — becoming another generic retail mall. The exodus of the fruit and veg traders was captured by the sculptor Raymond Mason in the late 1960s in a piece of artwork that now lives in the Tate Gallery.

The good news is that Smithfield will not become a retail park but instead one half will become the new home to the Museum of London, whose rather rundown home on the other side of the Barbican will become offices, and the other a food hall cum conference centre cum shared working space.

But enough about urban sustainability. As the clock ticks down to the mass sale of sides of beef, lamb, pigs heads and whole festive turkeys, here are a few photos of the Christmas Auction of 23 December 2023.

Eager shoppers gathered around the pallet "walkway" in Grand Avenue, the open road within the market, with some wearing animal-related hats. The butchers running the show received a big cheer before the meat went on show — lamb, beef and turkeys with prices from £10 to £50. Despite its name, it is not an auction as the butchers set the price. Bidders wave their cash in the air to get the traders' attention — and it has to be cash; no credit cards. Once sated the shoppers have to carry away their meat anyway they can.