What connects the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, the comedy actor Terry-Thomas and a branch of the Henson family? The unlikely answer is Smithfield Market.
What is Smithfield Market?
Smithfield Market is London’s world-famous wholesale meat market, located within the Square Mile of the City of London. Its nearest tube stations are Farringdon and Barbican. Dating back almost 900 years, it’s the oldest market of its type in Britain and one of the oldest in Europe.
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In the dead of night when the capital is asleep, Smithfield is a hive of activity, with trucks arriving and departing, forklifts moving pallets at speed and white-coated workers carrying meat boxes on their shoulders as deals are made and bargains negotiated at full voice all around them.
Is Smithfield Market closing?
The market is such a vibrant part of London life that I was shocked when news broke in November last year that the City of London Corporation was closing Smithfield for good in 2028, ending a long-term promise to move the business 12 miles east to Dagenham to allow the site to be sold. The truth is that supermarkets, butchers and catering firms can now buy their meat directly from abattoirs and online, bypassing the need for wholesale markets and a twilight trip to the City.
What's happening to Smithfield Market?
Just hours before the market closed for its traditional two-day Christmas break in 2024, I was delighted to hear that the City of London and the Smithfield traders had agreed a fresh plan to relocate the market when the current site eventually closes. There’s no word on where the new market might be – it’s way too early for that – except for a pledge that it will be “within the M25”.
Smithfield Market and popular culture
So a happy outcome as I join the dots and reveal the Smithfield link to a famous author, a typically English actor and the Henson clan. Charles Dickens portrayed Smithfield in two of his most celebrated novels, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. He depicts the original Victorian market as a place of crowds and chaos, full of grunting, bleating livestock and the shouts of the quarrelling buyers and sellers. To the poor orphan Oliver Twist, it was “a stunning and bewildering scene”.
Fast-forward to the 20th century and one of Britain’s top comedy actors, Terry-Thomas. He almost always played an upper-class ‘bounder’ with a gap-toothed grin and a monocle. But as a young man in the 1920s he had an improbable career at Smithfield, first as a junior clerk with a cold storage firm and later as a meat salesman. It must have been a puzzling sight for the butchers, porters and cashiers to see him strolling through the market’s ornate Grand Avenue with his walking cane, white gloves and red carnation buttonhole. Speaking to the BBC in 1981, Thomas admitted that he had been an over-dressed eccentric: “At Smithfield I was known as the man with the carpet slippers because I wore suede shoes. Preposterous!”
Finally, to a distant branch of the Henson family who called Smithfield their second home. My Victorian forebear Joseph Lincoln Henson was one of London’s principal dealers of tripe and offal. It doesn’t sound very glamorous to us these days but it was lucrative enough for Joseph to establish his business at Smithfield in 1895. The Henson company went on to supply brine-soaked meat to the salt-beef bars that became popular in the capital and the firm became a well-respected catering butcher.
The enterprise continues to this day, albeit under a different name and with new owners, but my enterprising ancestor is still remembered in the restaurants and delis that sell ‘Henson’s Famous Salt Beef’.
Main image: Butcher's display for the Armour Company at Smithfield Market, London/Credit: Getty
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