The accepted view of sheep is that they are countryside residents. But a traditional necessity has been for sheep to go to town, to be sold, live, or in form of meat. This is notwithstanding that some markets or marts do exist, or have in the past existed, in rural places. Towns, cities, urban areas are by their nature places of gathering - at varying size levels - of different types of people and elements. And for a commercial transaction in relation to sheep to occur most well and fruitfully for buyer and seller, and too for livelihood to be obtained by a panoply of associates - salesmen and auctioneers, drovers, transporters etc -, to have a centre which brings together all concerned is required.
By looking at sheep’s presences across a portion of London, a city which is moreover a capital, and therefore representing a major urban place, indication may be found - albeit in most large form - of the kinds of appearances which sheep have made in town over time.
Let us start at the centre, Smithfield. The first livestock market on the site was in the tenth century. The Smooth Field (as the area was known in the medieval period) provided grazing, was near to water, was by the City of London, and was by religious foundations which traded and held important fairs. The locale was a natural to be a livestock market. By the eighteenth century it had become in Daniel Defoe’s depiction ‘the greatest in the world’. And by the mid- nineteenth century, one and half million sheep per year were being ‘violently forced into an area of five acres’, it was reported by The Farmer’s Magazine (1849). The Smithfield Market scene, had had graphic depiction by Charles Dickens a little over a decade earlier in Oliver Twist:
‘It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roars of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.’
Portions of this portrayal by Dickens, with minor alterations made, are carved on a memorial sculptured stone bench designed by Sam Dawkins and Donna Walker, placed in West Smithfield Rotunda garden in 2006.
Smithfield Market in its incarnation by the mid- nineteenth century was clearly horrific, and an unhealthy presence to be ‘in the middle of town’. This had been recognised. The Market closed in 1855. Its replacement was The Metropolitan Cattle Market, opened to the north, up in airy Islington, in 1855.
The essence of Smithfield Market, as with any other livestock market of from a time until about the mid- nineteenth century, was that its livestock came to it live. Until relatively shortly before the demise of the first Smithfield Market, animals were driven to market. But once railways had appeared, animals would start to arrive at the Market by rail (nearly one million animals coming to London to be sold at Smithfield journeyed by rail by 1849).
In essence, until the mid- nineteenth century, much beyond Smithfield to the north, was countryside or individualised separate settlements or villages, until another town was arrived at. From whence livestock came, maybe from hundreds of miles away, it would be driven in short stages. A last overnight stopping point for rest and grazing on the way to London from the north/north-east for livestock that was being driven to London was a part of Hackney, the London Fields area. The area was common pastureland in 1275. By 1540 there was a London Field, and to become London Fields. A small area around London Fields tells in street names a link to sheep. There was a Mutton Lane. There is a Sheep Lane. There is too a Lamb Lane - but it is thought that the name may derive from a person’s name.
In a part of London Fields now is a 1988 sculpture by Freeform Arts Trust and schoolchildren, restored for Mosiac Allsorts by Tamara Froud in 2018. It commemorates livestock and produce, going, respectively, to Smithfield meat market, and to Cheapside market.
Smithfield, after lying fallow for a while, in 1868 opened up as a meat market in a custom-built building. Further additions came soon. This new Smithfield Market had an underground railway beneath it, and so could link to the railway system.
Northwards, meanwhile, live animals arrived in huge number at the huge, purpose-built, Metropolitan Cattle Market. The essential reason for this Market coming into existence was to be the solution to the difficulty that Smithfield Market - a small site in the centre of town - represented for dealing with live livestock. Despite its name, the role for the Metropolitan Cattle Market was to be a market for cattle, sheep and pigs. There were 1,800 pens to hold up to 35,000 sheep. The Market had been placed to be near railway stations and good yards. After getting to town by rail, the animals would be taken to depots and then driven the last distance. All necessary facilities were together in one place. There were four pubs, of which one was named The Lamb. The diminution in attendance of live animals that happened in the early twentieth century caused the decline of the Metropolitan Cattle Market. The site is now mixed-use but is largely a public park and part of which was refurbished from 2016 and with inclusion of presentations on the site’s market heritage.
London, as a large city, had a large population, and its appetite for meat matched. With the beginning of the introduction of refrigeration of a type to keep meat in viable condition, meat importation from afar - first done successfully with sheep meat from New Zealand in the 1880s - transformed the manner of provision of meat to London. This was a sea-change for many places.
At the time of writing, Smithfield Market is still in town, selling meat. Rather amazingly so. Its railway sidings beneath changed in the 1990s to become a vehicle park instead. Meat is now transported to-and-from by road vehicle. The Corporation of the City of London does, however, plan to move the Market to a site on the outskirts of town; and to be with two other London food Markets which have already been moved to outer London locations. This, purpose-built, site, to be named Dagenham Dock, is, as the name suggests, by the River Thames; it can be a transportation nexus, since it is by rail and road too.
This above has been a story of sheep in a transect across London. Though size and scale of activity will be less elsewhere, and to differing amounts, essentially the same tale can be manifest concerning lots of towns and sheep.
A town is a centre, and trade in sheep has - through time - needed a place for product, seller, buyer, consumer, and associated persons, to come together. A tangible product, even in a digital age, needs at some point to physically arrive with a buyer and consumer. And with a product being a perishable commodity, an extra dimension exists to the situation.
The story of towns and sheep is essentially that of product needing to be brought to consumer. Transportation is the fundamental necessary process. For centuries, the product, sheep, were driven to where they could be seen and purchased. They came on the hoof. This took time. And places for rest and food were needed on the way. Then animals came by train. With the introduction of refrigeration, the product would be expected to be brought in form of meat: and with this change, a huge alteration - of reduction of facilities (pens, slaughterhouses, and so on), and a streamlining of process -, could result. Refrigeration meant, moreover, that there was no longer a necessity existing for the sheep product to come to town, to place of consumption: it could travel to whatever place was most convenient for all constituents to reach, and where would be most economical for the product to go. The most likely mode of transport on a land mass would be road vehicle: and, in the further afield instances, rail/ship/plane being too used as needed. The plan for the new site for Smithfield meat market demonstrates the use of a multi-dimensional approach to meat transportation. Dagenham Dock, as the name suggests, is alongside a navigable portion of river (the Thames), and it is by roads and rails. It represents an interchange. It is away from a town-centre congestion.
So, while not all reasons of the past for ovines to be in town are gone, happily for sheep’s welfare and well-being, some are now vanished. And it is to be hoped that ongoing reasons will be questioned. This so that occasions which are decided as necessary to remain, for sheep to go to town - not their natural milieu -, are kept to the utter minimum.
17th May 2021