Save our Smithfield from yet another bland and boring shopping centre

At midnight, while the rest of Clerkenwell is heading to bed, the porters of Smithfield Market are just getting started; scurrying between refrigeration vans, offloading frozen carcasses and blood-soaked boxes from all over the country. By 4am the place is packed. Traders in stained white aprons shout out prices as cases of meat are sold to chefs from London’s finest restaurants and hotels. By 10 o’clock the whole thing has been washed away.

This is the way Smithfield has run for over a century. The last thing this unique part of the city needs is a load of suits taking over or another anonymous ‘shopping quarter’. But this very nearly happened, and still might.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has just called in the recently approved application to redevelop parts of Smithfield Market. Nearly 5,000 people signed a petition to save the market (designed in part by the creator of Tower Bridge) from this controversial scheme, which involves a partial demolition and the erection of soulless brick and glass shoeboxes. A full public inquiry will now ensue.

Contemporary writers, including Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock, Sarah Wise, Iain Sinclair and myself, have all been drawn to this powerful part of the metropolis, which Sinclair describes as ‘part of the labyrinth of old London, one of the real reservoirs of time in the city’. The poet John Betjeman lived there because he felt it was the most historic part of London. Playwright Alan Bennett says: ‘If you go to [Saint] Bartholomew’s and then walk through Smithfield it’s like walking from one cathedral to another. You wouldn’t pull down Bartholomew’s, nor should you pull down Smithfield.’ Other luminaries, including Jeanette Winterson and Glenda Jackson, have joined campaigners in a hard-fought battle to achieve this reprieve.

However, there is a long way to go before the plans are fully relinquished. If the proposed development — designed by John McAslan + Partners for Henderson Global Investors, and backed by English Heritage and the City of London Corporation — goes ahead, it will destroy the integrity of London’s most historically important enclave of purpose-built Victorian market buildings.

McAslan’s ‘vision’ for regenerating the site includes gutting the interior of the Grade II-listed General Market and removing the original glass and timber roof. The spacious, covered arcades with Phoenix columns, the arched colonnades and the Renaissance-style red-brick exterior will become bedfellows with three modern office blocks raised on a floating floor above new retail spaces, which will be filled with an ‘artisan quarter’ of shops, boutiques, restaurants and bars. I watched with dismay as a similar redevelopment project demolished parts of the original Spitalfields Market buildings in 2003 after a 13-year battle to save them. They were replaced with glass and steel offices, franchises and chain restaurants and quickly became just as indistinct as many other parts of the modern city. Do we really need any more places like this?

The computer-generated images of how Smithfield would look show the original façades reduced to little more than a stage set, dwarfed by three anonymous-looking blocks that would burst out of the space currently occupied by the roof. The towers would reduce in height as they move towards Farringdon Road; a concession I expect the architects have had to make because of planning regulations regarding the protected view of St Paul’s Cathedral. Nevertheless, the tallest of these new office blocks would still be six storeys high.

If these plans go ahead, we would break a link in time. Stories from the past would struggle to resurface and eventually disappear. Just outside the old Roman city walls and originally known as ‘Smooth Field’, the Smithfield Market site was once open land on the sloping hills of a fertile valley beside the River Fleet. A livestock market existed there from at least the tenth century. The 12th-century chronicler of London, William Fitzstephen, visited in 1174 and witnessed ‘fine horses’ being sold along with swine, cows and ‘oxen of immense bulk’. Daniel Defoe described the market as ‘without doubt the greatest in the world’ in 1726, but by the late 18th century the reputation of Smithfield had disintegrated, with muggings, fights and incidents of excessive cruelty. Cattle were often beaten with sticks and forced into crowded pens, before being slaughtered on the spot. The market was a dangerous, chaotic place, ‘ankle deep with filth and mire’ (Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, 1838), frequented by drovers, butchers, ‘idlers and vagabonds of every low grade’ and filled with the stench and the discordant din of thousands of terrified beasts. The livestock market was eventually condemned and moved to Islington in 1852.

A new market for selling ‘dead’ meat was erected in 1868, designed by Sir Horace Jones. Other additional buildings, also by Jones, came later: the Poultry Market (1875), the General Market (1883), the Fish Market Annex (1888) and the Red House cold store (1898). Smithfield Market was one of the most ambitious and expensive projects undertaken during the Victorian era. Covering ten acres of land, with cold stores, extensive vaults, underground storage and access to railway lines, the market was ‘both in appearance and arrangements a model market’ (London Pictorially Described, 1890). Inside, the spacious arcades were filled with technologically advanced features including a louvred roof cooling system.

The new Smithfield Market complex instantly became one of the most important wholesale markets in the world. For decades it was a huge employer, its own self-contained town. Since the Second World War the market has grad-ually reduced in size. Sections of the complex were damaged by bombing and fire, and the General Market and Annex buildings fell into decline and eventually lay derelict.

Greg Lawrence, chairman of the Smithfield Market Traders Association, expressed his disgust at the City of London Corporation for allowing these buildings to become so run-down: ‘They had a responsibility to upkeep the market buildings but they let them go to ruins.’ However, Lawrence is completely behind the Henderson Global Investors development. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the sooner these changes take place the better. The General Market building has been empty since 1997 and the Annex since 1984. There’s been no investment for decades and the place is falling apart. The proposed plans will bring life back to the area and be good for business.’