London’s 850-Year-Old Smithfield Meat Market Is Set to Close

For 22 years, John Burt has cut and trimmed steaks, chops and roasts in a butcher shop across the street from Smithfield, the oldest meat market in London. In that time, he said, he has watched the market’s slow decline, from a carnivore’s bustling bazaar to a hulking relic of an earlier London.

Still, the news this week that Smithfield will close — its owner, the City of London Corporation, killed a plan to move the market to a new site in East London — came as something of a jolt to him.

“I’m sad about it,” said Mr. Burt, 64, whose shop is separate from the market and will stay in business. “You wouldn’t have thought that Smithfield Market would ever shut down because it’s been around since the time of Henry VIII.”

Even longer, actually: Smithfield has been the site of a market since at least 1174, when medieval traders brought horses, cows, oxen and pigs to be sold there. In 1327, King Edward III gave the governing body of the City of London the right to operate Smithfield and other food markets. The current market, completed in 1868, is a marvel of Victorian engineering, with a cavernous roof and train tracks running underneath it (to transport the livestock).