The logic was absurd, but it has stuck. For many independent food retailers, this ‘second wave’ of supermarket expansion was even more devastating than the first, since it meant that for the first time, they were competing directly for the same business. By 2006, supermarkets had gained a 12 per cent share of the convenience sector and the figure was rising fast.10 My local food shop duly got Tesco’d in 2005. It was a sad day for me. Although no gastronomic Aladdin’s cave, the old shop had a certain quirky charm to it, and stocked a great range of pickles. Living in central London, I do not have to shop at Tesco if I don’t want to – it just means walking a bit further. But not everyone in Britain is that lucky. Residents of Bicester in Oxfordshire, for instance, a town of just 32,000, had no fewer than six Tesco stores by 2005, and very little else. One resident interviewed by the BBC was so desperate for a change that she was prepared to drive ‘as a special treat’ to Sainsbury’s in Banbury, a round trip of some 40 miles.11
Eviscerated City
Supermarkets are now so much part of our everyday lives that it can be hard to remember what cities were like before they came along. To anyone born after 1980, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers must seem about as remote as the days before mobile phones and computers (which, come to think of it, seem pretty remote even to me). Yet just a generation ago, high streets were the social hubs of urban neighbourhoods, and shopping for food was a time to swap news and gossip. Supermarkets today are impersonal filling stations: pit stops designed to service the flow of life. They support individual lifestyles, not sociability; a characteristic they share with iPods and computers. The internet may be a great communicative tool, but it can’t replace the connection we feel when we meet people in the flesh. That is where food is so powerful. It brings us together in physical space, forging bonds other media can’t reach.
In her seminal 1960s study The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the ‘ballet of Hudson Street’: daily life in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood where she lived in New York. With its mixture of houses, shops and small businesses, the street was animated at various times by people going about their daily routines: the cafés were crowded at midday with factory workers eating lunch; the shops were busy in the mornings and evenings when the locals did their shopping. Jacobs argued that the myriad of personal exchanges that took place every day in the street created a strong sense of local identity; a sense of communal ownership that encouraged people to look after the street, and by extension, one another. She recalled one incident, when she witnessed a pavement struggle between a man and a little girl:
As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher’s shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly on the other side … that man did not know it, but he was surrounded.12
The struggle turned out to be a false alarm (the man was the girl’s father), but the point was that on Hudson Street, anything out of the ordinary was immediately noticed; potential crimes were a matter of communal concern. Local shopkeepers acted like neighbourhood policemen: they knew everyone, and made it their business to know what was going on. As the title of her book suggests, Jacobs was a passionate critic of the monolithic, monocultural, ‘zoned’ approach to city-building that was then taking over in America. Her book was a paean to traditional mixed neighbourhoods, and their capacity to foster a sense of belonging.
Jacobs didn’t emphasise the role of food in forging social bonds, but without it, her beloved Hudson Street would have been a far emptier place. She took food’s role in urban life as a given – something too obvious to mention. Yet 40 years later, that role is not only under threat in America and Britain, but routinely undervalued or ignored. Unlike, say, the demolition of a beloved landmark, food’s disappearance from cities often leaves the urban fabric virtually untouched – as it did in the neighbourhood of my childhood. Growing up in central London in the 1960s, we had a small row of shops – a butcher, fishmonger, baker and greengrocer – at the end of our street. Every day, my mother took me and my brother there to do our daily shop. The shopkeepers knew us very well, and would offer us kids toys and sweets. Sometimes my mother would send us back to fetch something she had forgotten – her trust in her local shopkeepers was as implicit as their trust in her to pay them the following day. Today, that row of food shops is a series of antiques showrooms of the kind that displays just one item of furniture in the window, and it would be unthinkable for a six-year-old to be sent out shopping alone. To look at a map of that part of London now, you would hardly notice the difference – the buildings all look the same – yet the experience of living there has changed fundamentally. Forty years ago, it was the centre of a busy urban village. Now it has about as much life to it as an empty motorway.
Street life isn’t the only casualty of food’s disappearance from cities. Another seemingly trivial loss, but one that contributes a great deal to a city’s character, is smell. Our sense of smell is our most underrated faculty – something we have learnt to disdain. Yet nothing links us more powerfully to our emotions and memories. London was once a city of smells, and I can map my life there through them. Every morning on my way to school in Hammersmith, I had to run the gauntlet of the Lyons factory on Brook Green, with its heavenly aroma of chocolate sponge – something to which I was (indeed still am) very partial. Although the factory condemned me to arrive at school most days hopelessly salivating, it was an exquisite pain I bore quite happily. Other memorable odours included the stink of hops in Chiswick and Fulham from the breweries along the river, and the fishy whiff of Billingsgate, which lingered long after the market closed in 1982. Around that time I was living above a bean-sprout factory in Wapping, where the Chinese workers slept in hammocks over the bean-sprout tanks. The stench every week when the tanks were cleaned out was indescribable (actually, it was perfectly describable, but you probably don’t want to know what it smelt like).13 In any case, the air outside our front door was pungent enough to stop us from hanging about. I must have had a knack for smells, because my next move was to Bermondsey, close to the Sarson’s Vinegar factory on Tanner Road (which, as the name suggests, had once smelled even worse). When the wind blew in the right direction, you didn’t need to put vinegar on your chips; the air did it for you. Somehow the ubiquitous tang was rather comforting. You could always find your way home in the dark.
Most of London’s homely (and less homely) smells are now gone; expelled to factory complexes well outside the city. London is off the olfactory map – and a good thing too, you might think. Who wants to open their front door to the stench of rotten bean sprouts? The thing is, so many other things have disappeared along with those smells. Without anything to compare them with, it can be hard to realise quite how dead British cities have become – until you go abroad, that is. On a recent trip to India, it took me days to get used to the teeming life in the streets: to the cows and elephants, the goats and chickens, the beggars and sellers, the hooting, shouting and bellowing. To my health-and-safety-conscious eyes, everything seemed like an accident waiting to happen, catching my attention like pencils rolling off a desk: tottering lorries piled high with sugar cane, a pregnant woman crossing a six-lane highway between slamming buses and lorries, a cyclist wobbling in the wrong direction through the same metallic onslaught. Underpinning all this frenetic activity there was food: people cooking on pavements, smearing sweetmeats on the walls of holy shrines, buying snacks from carts and stands, carrying baskets of vegetables on their heads. Everywhere there were smells, too: delicious spicy ones, mingled with petrol, mud and excrement. India assaults your senses, but you soon get used to it. After India, it is Europe that is the real shock. The streets seem po
sitively deserted; the cars and buses impossibly large and shiny; the spaces between buildings huge and empty. Everywhere you look, there seems to be an absence of something: of people, animals, vegetables, smell, noise, ritual, necessity, death. The juxtapositions of human life have been designed out of our cities, leaving us to live in an empty shell.
The Carved City
Look at the plan of any city built before the railways, and there you will be able to trace the influence of food. It is etched into the anatomy of every pre-industrial urban plan: all have markets at their heart, with roads leading to them like so many arteries carrying in the city’s lifeblood. London is no exception. The first measured survey of the capital, John Ogilby’s Large and Accurate Map of the City of London of 1676, shows just how closely the city mirrored the landscape that fed it. The plan is essentially that of the modern City: its Roman walls roughly semicircular in shape on the north bank of the Thames, with St Paul’s just west of centre and the Tower pinning down its south-east corner. Running through the middle is a single broad street, joining Newgate in the west to Aldgate in the east. The various names along this street – Cheapside, Poultry and Cornhill – confirm that this was London’s central food market (‘cheap’ is from the Old English ceap, to barter). At Cornhill it crosses another broad street running from north to south: the City’s other main axis leading over London Bridge.
Detail of Ogilby’s map, shaded to show food markets and supply routes.
A closer reading of the map reveals how food once reached the city. London’s sheep and cattle, many of them from Scotland, Wales and Ireland, approached from the north and west, streaming down the country lanes to Newgate, where the ancient city’s livestock market was held. During the ninth century, the market expanded to a ‘smooth field’ (Smithfield) just outside the city gate, where a meat market remains to this day. In its heyday, Smithfield dominated the neighbourhood, as George Dodd’s description of the ‘Great Day’, held annually in the week before Christmas, attests:
What a day was this! … On that day, 30,000 of the finest animals in the world were concentrated within an area of four or five acres. They had been pouring in from ten o’clock on the Sunday evening, insomuch that by daylight on the Monday they presented one dense animated mass, an agitated sea of brute life. All around the market, the animals encroached on space rightfully belonging to shopkeeping traffic; Giltspur Street, Duke Street, Long Lane, St John’s Street, King Street, Hosier Lane – all were invaded; for the cauldron of steaming animalism overflowed from very fullness.14
Animals may no longer walk to Smithfield, but their memory lingers in its physical fabric. The names of local streets – Cowcross Street, Chick Lane, Cock Lane – recall a time when the area was full of living beasts, and St John’s Street, the chief route into the market from the north, is a broad, curving thoroughfare that still has something of the air of a country lane, its sweeping contours carved by the ‘sea of brute life’ that once flowed down it like a river.
Since London’s turkeys and geese came mainly from Suffolk and Norfolk (as many still do), they entered the city through Aldgate, having made the journey with specially protected cloth-wrapped feet. Poultry, to the east of the city, is where they were bought and sold. Fruit and vegetables from Kent and Surrey were either sold at Borough Market or along Gracechurch Street, the road leading up from London Bridge to Leadenhall at the city’s main crossroads. Leadenhall was London’s first enclosed market, and still stands today on its historic site, near to the site of the ancient Roman forum. Such physical longevity is typical of markets everywhere – once established, they very rarely move. The river ports of Billingsgate and Queenhithe (originally owned, as we saw in the last chapter, by City and Crown) doubled as London’s main markets for fish and grain, as well as imported food. The streets leading up from the ports to Cheapside also became markets in their own right, as their names – Bread, Garlick and Fish Street – attest.
At first glance, London’s medieval plan may seem irrational, with its crooked streets, crowded spaces and lack of geometrical clarity. But seen through food, it makes perfect sense. Food shaped London, as it did every pre-industrial city, and as a way of engendering life and urban order, few things work half as well.
Necessary Chaos
The presence of food in cities once caused chaos, but it was necessary chaos, as much a part of life as sleeping and breathing. Food was bought and sold openly in the streets, mainly so that authorities (such as the Parisian grain police) could keep an eye on proceedings. The principle of visibility meant that selling food indoors was prohibited in most medieval cities, which in turn meant that food shops as we know them now did not exist. Although houses facing on to markets were allowed to sell food, they had to do so over open boards, while their customers remained standing in the street. Most food was sold in the market, either from packs or barrels on the ground, or from portable trestles, set up and dismantled each day and stored in nearby houses. Market traders were granted pitches allowing them to sell certain foods in specific places and at set times, and were forbidden to wander about or sell their produce in any other way. Because of this, pitches were jealously guarded, and disputes over territory were common. In fifteenth-century Padua, one quarrel between the city’s fruiterers and vegetable-sellers was only settled when the mayor himself intervened, marking a line on the ground with his own hand.
The space in which food could be sold in cities also had to be controlled in order to stop it from taking over the streets entirely, as this thirteenth-century London edict suggests:
All manner of victuals that are sold by persons in Chepe [Cheapside], upon Cornhill and elsewhere in the city, such as bread, cheese, poultry, fruit, hides and skins, onions and garlic, and all other small victuals, for sale as well by denizens as by strangers, shall stand midway between the kennels [gutters] of the streets, so as to be a nuisance to no-one, under pain of forfeiture of the article.15
Since markets were often the only large public spaces in cities, most had to double as ceremonial spaces too. One contemporary sketch of Cheapside shows the market transformed to receive Marie de Medici.16 A series of grandstands decked out with striped awnings and banners line the space, with rows of feather-hatted noblemen watching a seemingly endless procession of horse-drawn carriages, flanked by pike-bearing soldiers and drummers. The market’s half-timbered buildings serve as the peanut gallery, their windows crammed with faces, one to each leaded windowpane. The sketch demonstrates what a naturally theatrical space Cheapside was. Swap the ducks and geese for a few royal props, and hey presto: the market metamorphoses into a royal reception room. It is a pity (but typical) that no similar sketch exists of Cheapside in its ordinary, everyday use. Nobody ever thinks the mundane routines of their own day are worth recording.
Markets often represented cities on formal occasions, but at other times they were the place where the countryside came to town. Rome’s Piazza Montanara was one of the city’s liveliest markets until it was destroyed by Mussolini during his imperial makeover of the city in the 1930s. The piazza, which was on the site of the ancient city’s vegetable market, the Forum Holitorium, was the Sunday meeting place for contadini, country folk who walked through the night to sell produce there, exchange labour, or use the services of the barbers, scribes and tooth-extractors who came each week to attend to their needs. At festival times, such rural invasions could take over the city completely. Many urban festivals were derived from country traditions in any case; and local peasants often chose to come to the city to celebrate them, giving the latter a changed, bucolic flavour. A group of English visitors to Prato in Tuscany for the Feast of Our Lady in 1605 remarked on the curious appearance of the large crowd gathered in the main piazza, ‘whereof we judged one half to have hats of straw and one fourth part to be bare-legged’.17
The Political Market
The pivotal role played by markets in urban life made them inherently political. Two of the most famous public spaces in the wo
rld, the Roman Forum and the Athenian Agora, were both originally food markets, that gradually made the transition from commercial to political use as the cities they served grew in size. The pattern was to be repeated all over Europe: one only has to think of the number of town halls on market squares to understand the power of the relationship. Such urban set pieces were both highly practical and gave a clear symbolic expression of the civic order.
The thirteenth-century Palazzo della Ragione in Padua – affectionately known locally as il Salone – is one such arrangement. The building’s nickname refers to its council chamber, a vast first-floor hall with the largest vaulted wooden roof of its day, set over a series of arcades and shops. The vertical arrangement was necessary because the Salone was built right in the middle of the city’s market square, whose two halves thus had to be reunited beneath its belly. For centuries, representatives of the Paduan Commune gathered here to discuss matters of state, while the bustle of market life carried on below. Hall and market were a perfect reflection of the urban hierarchy: politics supported by commerce, and the mutual dependence of one upon the other. The Salone has dominated visual representations of Padua since it was built, looming out of prints like some benign whale beached in the midst of the city. The architect Aldo Rossi called it an ‘urban artifact’, a civic monument so powerful that it held its meaning for the city long after its original use had ceased:
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 14
