A night in Smithfield

The night begins at around 10p.m. Shop men arrive to unload deliveries and load orders for larger customers. During the busiest times, lorries and vans are blocking the roads, and the pavements are teeming with life, meat is moving inwards and outwards, loading andunloading, boxes piled onto pallets, speared by forklift trucks and spun away.

Lorries from slaughterhouses reverse onto the loading bays (fig. 6.4). Up on a red platform, surrounded by a crazy complex of buttons and machinery (fig. 6.5), the drivers help MWs sling bundles of carcasses onto a slow-moving conveyor belt of hook rails, which lowers them into the dim grey-metal service corridors (fig. 6.6). Here, Davey the rail man guides them to their respective shops, sending them swaying and rattling along a dense network of overhead rails with a shove of his metal shepherd’s crook.

From around midnight, the cutters are ready in their cutting room (fig. 6.7), a refrigerated box of white panels scattered with exclamatory warning signs, with a cold that cuts to your toes, and a low ceiling with hooks and rails. During busy times, it’s noisy and crowded; duck to avoid a line of carcasses trundling towards you on rails; keep your wits about you, ready to answer the abuse flying your way (‘Get back in the ugly shop, you ugly bastard!’). People wander in and out with trolleys, appear framed in the doorway briefly, exchange yells, disappear. Some are old friends, others unknown (‘Right, who are you, and what do you want?’). On busy nights, the tempo is ramped up to an incredible speed: Rob rampages about the tiny room, slinging bags of meat, batting carcasses out of his way, hauling them about in a lumbering dance, organising orders, arguing with customers (‘No, you’re all done mate!’ ‘You’ve had four, and that was it.’ ‘No, you’re the one that’s fucking about, not me.’). He joins in with banter, cackling heartily, scolds inexperienced workers: ‘OI! ANTON! USE A FUCKING GLOVE!’

The shop men scrabble about in the bins, bent double as the cutters throw meat at them, groping bare-handed at cold, soft lamb shoulders, dripping trailing bleeding adhesive bits of flesh, hands saturated with the homely smell of lamb fat, gripping greasy forelegs below the elbow, tumbling them together into plastic-smelling bags.

With your back to the service corridor, pick your way across the cutting room, around carcasses, past quarters of beef and hatstands of smiling pigs’ heads, through a glass door and you’re into the shop front (fig. 6.8). The shops are boxed off from each other with white and stainless-steel panels that gleam in the harsh white tube-lights. At some stalls, the white is broken with bucolic backdrops, images of cows grazing green pastures, cooked meat artfully presented. The salesmen arrive at 2a.m. and arrange the displays in glass cabinets: trays of pale-smelling chicken legs, lamb breasts marbled pink and white. Gleaming plucks and hearts, burgundy-brown or the deepest red, tripe with its earthy stench, piles of sheep’s heads: skin-off, red and madly grinning through dull blue eyes; skin on, hard and yellowish, tongues twisted in agony.

Although bright labels boast special offers, pitching is unheard of among salesmen. Most hard-sell activity is limited to mobile phone conversations and text-message exchanges with large customers; salesmen remain reserved with the customers in Buyers Walk, serving them in an almost pointedly unhurried fashion (‘I like to make ’em wait. Makes us look popular,’ a salesman winked at me as he refused my help in serving the gathering queue). Still, it’s a bustle even out here, with thin tinny music, yells and swearing across the fridge sounds.

And out, past the glass cabinets, you’re in Buyers Walk, with customers sauntering and shuffling, MWs rattling and trundling past with trolleys and pump-trucks, salesmen dancing in the aisles. Downhill towards the market’s centre, you’ll come out in Grand Avenue, underneath the clock that stands as synecdoche for the whole market, the market’s heart. Grand Avenue is lined with elaborate cast iron grating, lorry height, bold in green and lilac-blue, vaulting overhead in star-studded arches. Most striking are the iron gates to Buyers Walk, thrust open now: blue, purple, green, gold. Lions with tongues protruding, sea shells, a leafy twisting burst of gaudy colour (fig. 6.9).

A constable (security guard) gave me a tactile tour of these gates. Running his hands along them, he showed me the workmanship, where they were joined, where they were broken. ‘Try to push it. See how heavy it is.’ I felt the immense, cold resistance against my own force. ‘Ya see?’ he beamed, triumphantly. He summoned me to a room behind the office, where parts of the gate were lovingly kept while waiting to be re-affixed. He handled each one tenderly, passed it to me to show me the weight.

From under the clock, looking back along Buyers Walk, above the rows of stalls in white and metal, you can see the original structure again: lilac-blue and magenta pillars and arches holding aloft the wooden slatted ceiling, ‘Like the upside-down hull of a ship,’ said a shop man. It’s painted a different kind of white to the white below, with skylight windows that let in the pale light of dawn when the night comes to an end and everyone is exhausted, tempers are frayed, the avenues are lined with rubbish, and everyone wants to go home. And at the furthest point at each end, plaques commemorate the market’s completion, echoing the gates in twisting leaves: ‘Completed 1868’ (fig. 6.10).

People would often gesture to this date when telling me the building’s history or when joking about a fellow MW’s age (‘He remembers when this was built!’). But for most MWs, Smithfield’s story begins hundreds of years before this date. Davey dreams of making a film about Smithfield. It would open with the excesses of Bartholomew Fair, with people being burned, before fading to modern times: a Smithfield cutter (and professional boxer) receives a blow to the chin from his friend and collapses to the floor. He regains consciousness, laughs. ‘What the fuck you do that for?’ This sense of seamless continuity between past and present violence and laughter is widely shared among MWs; for them, Smithfield today continues this tradition of lawlessness and wild abandon.