People like to talk about London not being a 24-hour city and for the most part, it’s true. Compare it to New York, Tokyo and Bangkok and London is a child drinking warm milk in bed while all the adults party downstairs. This might be truer still now the closure of Smithfield has been announced.
One of the city’s famed but few nocturnal operations, a wholesale food market in situ for almost 900 years, it is set to close after the City of London Corporation (CoLC) revealed its council voted to call time on both Smithfield and Billingsgate fish market (more on the latter another day). A statement from the corporation said both will continue until 2028. Beyond that, the future of the world’s oldest meat market, first approved in 1327 by King Edward III and today housed in a relic of fine Victorian architecture, is unknown and unpredictable.
