The sun has just set on 1,000 years of London history

Smithfield Market will close, but it doesn't have to be like this

- Jonathan Prynn

In around four years’ time, possibly a little longer, the last carcasses will be loaded off refrigerated trucks, as they always are, shortly before midnight. Seven hours later, as rueful traders head off for their traditional dawn pint of Guinness one final time, Smithfield Market will close its doors for good. A daily London ritual keeping the capital supplied with beef, pork, poultry and lamb since the 10th century will be no more.

The City of London Corporation has been itching to move Smithfield’s traders on — just as drovers once herded cattle down the “hollow way” of north London — for some years. As long ago as 2018, the corporation snapped up the former Barking Reach power station site armed with plans to turn it into an integrated modern food market, not just for Smithfield, but for Billingsgate and Spitalfields too.

That grandiose scheme is now in tatters, a victim, it seems, of the spiralling costs that have bedevilled all major construction projects since the triple whammy of Brexit, the pandemic and the energy crisis.

What has come as a shock, though, is that there is no plan B. In a bald statement this week the corporation’s Court of Common Council — the City seems happy to keep its ancient titles if not its ancient markets simply said it had decided to “end its interest in co-locating the wholesale food markets of Smithfield and Billingsgate to a new site at Dagenham Dock”.

A golden goodbye Perhaps surprisingly there was no immediate howl of protest from traders left in the dark about an uncertain future. That could be because the corporation has allocated a reported £300 million to enable traders to “identify suitable new sites” and “help them relocate to new premises”.