‘The slight unevenness in his gait became more pronounced as he walked down the slope towards Smithfield Market, monolithic in the winter darkness, a vast rectangular Victorian temple to meat, where from four every weekday morning animal flesh was unloaded, as it had been for centuries past, cut, parcelled and sold to butchers and restaurants across London.’
Galbraith, Robert. The Silkworm: Cormoran Strike Book 2 (pp. 1-2)
Strike makes an early morning visit to the Smithfield Café on Long Lane, next to London’s famous meat market to meet reporter Dominic Culpepper and pass him information about a tax dodging peer he has spent all night collecting. Waiting for the reporter and tucking in with satisfaction to a full English breakfast, he contemplates the carvings on the building opposite. Live animals were sold at Smithfield until the middle of the nineteenth century, but as the city grew, driving livestock to and from the market grew impossible, and it became an early morning a market for cut meat. The new building, where butchers from all over London come to buy from wholesalers, is topped with statues representing London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and features elaborate decorative ironwork reminiscent of Tower Bridge. Not surprising perhaps as the two London monuments share an architect, Sir Horace Jones.
Smithfield was also the site of the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day fair, held in August and apparently a ‘dangerous sink for all the vices of London.’ In 1845, the Guildhall heard 45 cases of felony misdemeanour and assault all of which had taken place during the fair. It was also the scene of darker crimes and punishments. In 1849, when workmen dug through the area to create the new sewer, they are said to have found blackened stones and human bones. These were believed to be the remains of the Smithfield burnings, when protestants were executed for heresy on the site under the rule of Mary Tudor in the sixteenth century.
