The Victorian City

by Judith Flanders

  Finally, in 1852, the Smithfield Removal Bill was passed in Parliament, and the live meat market was closed in 1855, moving to Copenhagen Fields in Islington. In 1868, the old Smithfield ground, now called West Smithfield, was re-established, this time as a dead-meat market – that is, for butchered meat, not live animals – complete with an underground station to bring in the goods for sale. (The hay market survived at Smithfield because officials had forgotten to allow space for it in the new market in Islington; it continued until 1914, when the rise of the car made it redundant.) No longer would the cry of ‘Mad bull!’ run through the City. The new market was iron-roofed, gaslit, with wooden stalls: the epitome of modern trade elegance, complete with restaurants and drinking establishments, and rooms for dining, meeting, or reading the newspaper. Other markets had to wait longer for renovation. Leadenhall had been the largest market in Europe, selling dead meat, skin and leather; herbs and ‘green’-market goods; pigs, and poultry, in three separate yards, from 1400. Gradually poultry became its main item (in Dombey and Son, Captain Cuttle hires ‘the daughter of an elderly lady who usually sat under a blue umbrella in Leadenhall Market, selling poultry’), and in 1871 an Act was passed to prevent the old market from continuing to sell hides or meat.

  These specialist markets serving the whole of London were the exception. Many neighbourhoods supported a small market of one sort or another, and most had several. In the streets around Oxford Street, for example, there were Carnaby market, ‘now but a small provision market’; Oxford market, near Portland Street, which sold vegetables and meat; Portman market, for hay, straw, butter, poultry, meat and ‘other provisions’; St George’s market, at the western end of Oxford Street, primarily for meat, but with many nearby vegetable stalls; Mortimer market, ‘a very obscure market’; and Shepherd’s market, on the south side of Curzon Street, for provisions generally, ‘a convenience for this genteel neighbourhood, and...not a nuisance’. (It is notable that only in this very exclusive district does the compiler of this list consider that a market might be a ‘nuisance’.)

  Around the Strand and Covent Garden was Hungerford market (underneath what is now Charing Cross station), which sold fish, fruit, vegetables and dead meat. It also had a number of poulterers’ shops, with live cockerels and hens, their black beady eyes peeping through the wicker baskets. Beside these basics, according to one author mid-century, the market was also known for its penny ices, advertised as ‘the best in England’. Hungerford had been covered over since the seventeenth century, but in 1830 it was expanded and rebuilt on three levels, with a fish market below and fruit and vegetables above. Dickens was spotted here one day in 1834, behind a coal-heaver carrying a child who peeked shyly over his father’s shoulder at the young journalist. Dickens promptly bought a bag of cherries and, walking along, posted them one by one into the child’s mouth without his father being aware, ‘quite as much pleased as the child’.

  There had been a market at Hungerford Stairs (where Charing Cross station now stands) for 200 years, but in 1830 a modern three-storey market was built. It was only after this, when ‘the very nature of the ground changed’, that the adult Charles Dickens felt able to revisit the spot where the blacking factory had once stood.

  Nearby was Lumber Court market, in Seven Dials, selling fish, and some vegetables and meat. Newport market, off Great Newport Street, west of Long Acre, sold butchers’ meat, and also had a large number of slaughter-men: around 400 bullocks, up to 700 sheep and 100 calves were slaughtered there weekly. In 1837, one author noted that most butchers slaughtered the animals in their cellars, tipping the blood down the drains – perhaps as much as 12,000 barrels of blood annually. Things altered little: thirty years later James Greenwood, a journalist of London’s underbelly, claimed that one firm slaughtered 1,000 sheep weekly behind its market stall, in a shed ‘no larger than a drawing-room, in which were eight men gory to the elbows’.

  Clare market, between the Strand and Lincoln’s Inn Fields (where the Aldwych is today), sold butchers’ meat, vegetables, tripe, dogs’- and cats’-meat. Although smaller than many markets it was still ‘a nuisance’, owing to its twenty-six butchers, who between them weekly slaughtered 400 sheep, up to 200 bullocks and an unknown number of calves, ‘in the market, or in the stalls behind, and in cellars’. On Saturday nights, therefore, the market-goers found themselves ‘tramping about in...a rich compost of dead rats, sickening offal, and decaying vegetable matter, which changes its colour only where the red stream from the shops has formed into stagnant pools, offending the sight as terribly as the surrounding nastiness annoys the nostrils’. In the late 1850s, one street there housed six slaughterhouses within a few yards of each other, as well as a tripe boiler and a livery stables, all next door to three small houses, in which lived four families of five to six people.

  These small-scale slaughterhouses situated cheek-by-jowl with private houses were a fact of life, and for the most part they were unquestioned. In Farringdon, one William Waight was prosecuted in 1847, not because he slaughtered sheep and cattle on his premises, but because he allowed the resulting ‘dung and filth’ to sit in his yard for three years. A cease and desist order was handed down, but Waight, who failed to show up for the hearing, ‘continues to slaughter as heretofore’. Even Dickens’ magazine, usually so compelling in its outrage over the squalid living conditions of the poor, commented apropos of the slum of St Giles, not far from Clare market, that ‘There are no trades in the district that affect in a remarkable degree the health of its inhabitants; there is nothing worse than the fifteen not ill-managed slaughterhouses.’ This was not the way Dickens himself wrote. Earlier, in a polemic against Smithfield cattle market, he broke off to inquire satirically why there should be any reason not to have ‘cattle-driving, cattle-slaughtering, bone-crushing, blood-boiling, trotter-scraping, tripe-dressing, paunch-cleaning, gut-spinning, hide-preparing, tallow-melting...in the midst of hospitals, church-yards, workhouses, schools, infirmaries, refuges, dwellings, provision-shops, nurseries, sick-beds, every stage and baiting-place in the journey from birth to death’?

  This was the reality, for markets also sustained subsidiary industries that were deeply offensive, such as the licensed slaughterhouse in Smithfield, where animals unfit for human consumption ended up. To those venturing into the yard, ‘the sense of smell is not only assailed, but taken by storm, with a most horrible, warm, moist, effluvium’. Much worse lay next door, where ‘you will find the largest sausage manufactory in London’, owned by the ‘brothers, we believe’ of the slaughterhouse owner. The best of the diseased animals were quietly slipped over to the sausage machine, ‘to be advantageously mixed with the choppings of horse-flesh’ and ‘sold to the poor, in small lots by gas-light, on Saturday nights, or in the form of soup; and to the rich, in the disguise of a well-seasoned English German-sausage’. It was well known that the retail markets sold diseased meat; Newgate market was more corrupt only in that it sold it wholesale.

  For most of the century, and for most of the population, it was the smaller, unmodernized markets that were their primary shopping locations. There were dozens of working-class markets, many if not most held on a Saturday night and again on Sunday mornings. Wages were paid at the end of the working day on Saturdays, and a family’s main purchases were made that evening, after six or seven, with the markets lit up dazzlingly. By the 1850s, a variety of lighting was used on the stalls, from ‘the new self-generating gas-lamp’ through the ‘old-fashioned grease lamp’ down to various makeshifts: a candle stuck in a bundle of sticks, or even in a turnip, or just a wick wrapped in a piece of brown paper, which flared up nicely before burning down. The shops themselves relied on gas, ‘Great jets...flaming and roaring far out into the thoroughfare, stretching like some fiery sword across the pavement, waving to and fro at each gust of wind’. In larger markets, such as Whitechapel, ‘The gas...flaring from primitive tubes, lights up a long vista of beef, mutton, and veal. Legs, shoulders, loins, ribs, hearts, livers
, kidneys, gleam in all the gaudy panoply of scarlet and white on every side.’ Outside on the pavement was an informal set of pitches and itinerant sellers, almost another market as pedestrians navigated the ‘trucks, barrows, baskets, and boards on tressels [sic], laden with...O ysters, vegetables, fruit, combs...ballads, cakes, sweetstuff, fried fish, artificial flowers...chairs, brushes and brooms, soap, candles, crockery-ware, ironmongery, cheese, walking-sticks, looking-glasses, frying-pans, bibles, waste-paper, toys, nuts, and fire-wood’.

  The glare was matched by the noise. Each seller had his own cry, and called out regularly, enticing shoppers by the goodness or the cheapness of his wares. In the working-class market of St Luke’s, Clerkenwell, one butcher shouted, ‘Hi-hi! weigh away – weigh away! the rosy meat at three-and-half! Hi-hi!’ The cries of Bethnal Green market, behind Shoreditch Church in east London, ran the gamut: ‘Who’ll buy a cock?’ ‘Almond nuts!’ ‘Hay’penny a lot, whelks; toss or buy!’ And in the New Cut, in Bermondsey,

  the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices...‘So-old again’...‘Chestnuts all ’ot, a penny a score’...‘An ’aypenny a skin, blacking’...‘Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy – bu-u-uy!’ cries the butcher. ‘Half-quire of paper for a penny,’ bellows the street stationer...‘Twopence a pound grapes.’ ‘Three a penny Yarmouth bloaters.’ ‘Who’ll buy a bonnet for fourpence?’ ‘Pick ’em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.’ ‘Now’s your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.’ ‘Here’s ha’p’orths,’ shouts the perambulating confectioner. ‘Come and look at ’em! here’s toasters!’ bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork. ‘Penny a lot, fine russets’...‘Fine warnuts! sixteen a penny, fine war-r-nuts’...a double ‘handful of fine parsley for a penny’...‘Ho! ho! hi-i-i! What do you think of this here? A penny a bunch – hurrah for free trade! Here’s your turnips!’

  The purchasers moved slowly along amid the noise and dazzle, while the sellers shouted enticements and encouragement. The main pathways were thronged with women with large market baskets, although some of them allowed their husbands to follow along ‘as basket-bearers and light porters generally’. The first item to be purchased by the comfortably-off artisan’s wife was the Sunday-dinner joint, and so the butchers’ shops were slowly surveyed. A butcher offered his beef at ‘three-and-six, that’s under eightpence a-pound!’, but any housewife worth her salt at this stage made a feint of leaving, allowing herself to be persuaded back, only to shift her attention to a joint of mutton. It too was, naturally, ‘as good a bit as ever you had a knife in, I’ll go bail...I t ought to be nine-and-a-half [pence per pound], but, as I want to make a regular customer of you, we’ll say nine.’ The housewife made another sortie. ‘Well, now, come, what will you give?’ asked the butcher in reply; her counter-offer of 8d a pound was rejected, before 8½d was finally agreed – if, the frugal shopper added in triumph, the butcher would throw in some suet as well. The butcher accepted, ‘resignedly’. Then on to the butterman, where ‘after smelling, tasting, and otherwise testing a large variety of samples’, the housewife beat down the price once more, agreeing to buy all her butter, cheese and bacon from him for a discount. And so on, until around nine o’clock, when the major purchases had been made, and the housewives headed for home, their husbands trailing behind.

  Sunday markets were considered less respectable, especially by the middle classes, who thought that decent people should be in church, not shopping for food. (The fact that most of the working classes finished work at 10 p.m. or later on Saturdays, and were not paid until then, leaving no time at all to shop, was skated over by the Sabbatarians.) One such market among many was in Brill Place, behind Euston station. In the 1850s, it was so crowded on Sunday mornings that the road became ‘almost impassable’. The shoppers were for the most part very poor: many of the women couldn’t even afford bags, but carried their purchases in their aprons, by gathering the corners together. Mayhew said that the men generally stood around and talked, while the women went from butcher to coal seller to baker, between stalls selling anything from ‘Walnuts, blacking, apples, onions, braces, combs’ to ‘turnips, herrings, pens and corn-plaster’. When the church bells began to ring, the tempo speeded up to a frantic pace, to get everything bought in that last half-hour before the legally enforced closure during the hours of church services. Once the bells stopped, the only shops that remained open were the cookshops, which baked the meat and vegetables brought to them in their owners’ dishes; these would be ready for collection when the other shops reopened after church. Whitecross Street market, another Sunday market, was much larger. Near Old Street, towards the Barbican, it opened at 7 a.m. on Sundays, with sellers including butchers, bakers, grocers, provision dealers, linen drapers, hosiers, milliners, furniture brokers, ironmongers, hardware and trinket shops, leather sellers and curriers. The working poor arrived first, but by nine the market was filling with the ‘hungry, meagre, and unwashed’.

  Many men spruced themselves up while their wives shopped. ‘Sunday morning is always an exceedingly busy time in a barber’s shop in a working-class neighbourhood,’ as men had their weekly shave, or the ‘swells’ who were going out for the day came in ‘to have their hair brushed and “done up”’. In Nicholas Nickleby, the barber in Soho is considered ‘a highly genteel establishment – quite first-rate in fact’, and yet the accompanying illustration makes plain that the ‘shop’ was nothing more than the front room of an ordinary house, as so many still were. But the main occupation there was local gossip, exchange of news and a look at the Sunday papers, as well as ‘various cunningly concocted “revivers”, which are euphemistically styled medicine’, and were sold circumspectly to customers the barber knew personally, as they were in reality alcohol to cure Saturday-night heads.

  There were also dozens of thriving second-hand clothes markets, the best known of which was in the East End of London, spread around Houndsditch and in Petticoat Lane. This was Rag Fair, the centre of the old-clothes market, which was said to be entirely run by Jews. The Exchange in Houndsditch was originally held on about an acre of ground, enclosed by wooden hoardings. Inside, there were four double rows of benches, where the sellers sat back to back with their wares laid out on the ground in front of them. Soon the selling area spread to encompass the neighbouring streets, and two distinct markets arose. The first had about ninety stalls by the late 1840s, where second-hand clothes were sold wholesale, for resale or renewing. These items appeared to have no use or value at all: some ‘old tea-coloured stays, and bundles of wooden busks [the supports in corsets], and little bits of whalebone’; or boots with no soles; or just the ribs of umbrellas. But buyers were looking for goods for breaking, or taking apart, using the materials to produce other items; or for turning, making new versions of whatever they had been before. Goods that were past both these stages still had value, being sold for shoddy, a fabric made from old wool rewoven with new; worn-out shoddy was broken down for manure, or bleached and sold to paper mills.

  The second area of the market, about a third smaller, was where renovated clothing was sold to second-hand dealers stocking their shops. Shopkeepers from as far afield as Marylebone Lane, Holywell Street, Monmouth Street, Drury Lane, Saffron Hill, the Waterloo Road and Shoreditch itself, all poor districts, bought from the Exchange. In the 1840s and 1850s, admission to both areas was ½d for buyers and sellers. A third area, with no admission charge, operated as a retail market in the afternoons. There sellers displayed their stock, purchased from unredeemed pledges from pawnbrokers’ shops, or overstocks from military suppliers.

  Boots were sold separately, in an area centred on Rosemary Lane (from 1850 renamed Old Mint Street), near the Tower, and around Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. Boots, pre-mechanization, were expensive. Those that had worn out were refronted and sold to clerks and others who needed to look respectable for work. Boots that were too worn out for that were translated’: resoled, refronted once more an
d the leather painted to look (briefly) new. These were sold to the very poor. Mayhew counted 800 shops selling translated boots, but this was probably a vast underestimate, as many boots were sent to Ireland to be translated and then returned to London for sale in the cheapest shops.

  In some ways, these markets were no more salubrious than the meat markets. The smell of the old clothes, the old shoes, ‘together with, in the season, half-putrid hare skins, is almost overpowering’: a ‘peculiar sour smell blended with the mildewy’. For any smell to have overpowered Londoners, it must have been truly noxious, for the city was filled with stenches. Horses produced their own smells. Omnibuses at their peak utilized 40,000 horses in London, and each horse ate nearly twenty-one pounds of oats and hay daily, so the quantity of manure left behind on the streets can be imagined – and this was without taking into account the dray horses, carthorses, carriage horses, riding horses, or costermongers’ donkeys and ponies, much less the cattle and sheep driven through the streets. Pickford’s Removals, a moving company, alone kept 1,500 horses to pull its vans in 1870, and that same year 18 million tons of coal were delivered for domestic use, almost all by horse-drawn cart. No one knows how many horses there were in London before the twentieth century: they were so ubiquitous that no one ever thought to count them, but there can have been no district that did not smell of horses and manure.47