Smithfield Market

History

The lords’ moat becomes a market

For centuries the moated house of the de Birmingham family had stood just below St Martin’s church. By the early nineteenth century it was a relic, and the town’s Street Commissioners wanted the ground. The Street Act of 1812 let them buy “the Moat and Moat House”. Showell gives the price of the house, moat and ground as £5,672.

On 27 March 1815 the Commissioners offered a premium of £10 for a plan for adapting the premises “for the Accommodation of the intended Smithfield”. The house was cleared in May 1816, its outbuildings the next month, and the moat was filled in.

Pens, pigs and hay

Smithfield opened on Thursday 29 May 1817, the day of the Whitsun fair, for “neat Cattle, Horses, Sheep, and Pigs”. Hay and straw followed on the Tuesday after. Until then the animals had been sold in the streets: pigs and sheep in New Street, cattle in Dale End and Deritend, hay in Ann Street. Gathering them into one yard was the Commissioners’ second great step in reordering the town’s markets, after the clearing of the Bull Ring in 1806.

Pigott Smith’s plan of 1855 shows the result: open ground filled with rows of pens, a small octagonal building in the middle and buildings along the northern edge. The town argued for years about moving the cattle out to Duddeston. In March 1865 the Council voted 31 to 30 against it, and a public meeting in December 1869 again preferred Smithfield.

Under glass

In the end it was fruit and vegetables that took over. In 1881–83 a covered wholesale market was built over the north-western part of the site, with a glass roof on iron columns and brick outer walls. A photograph of about 1887 shows its gabled brick fronts on Jamaica Row, each with a tall arched entrance. The pigs shared the roof, behind a wooden partition, in a pig market the Corporation’s historian called “inconvenient, cold, and windy”.

Live cattle sales were falling, blamed on imported dead meat and on the rules restricting the movement of stock to stop disease. In 1897 the pig market moved to Montague Street, and the cattle followed in 1898. The vegetable market took their space. In 1899 the Corporation bought W. & T. Avery’s premises in Moat Lane for £5,600 to extend it again, and by 1900 the whole site had been taken over. Takings had risen from £2,453 in 1883 to £8,040 in 1897–98, and still “many applications for stands were refused”.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

The open ground by Moat Row had another life as well. Until 1957 the Rag Fair, the town’s second-hand market, was held in its lower part.

Cleared twice

In the 1970s Birmingham built new Wholesale Markets on the site. Their first phase, for fish, meat and poultry, opened in February 1974, and the Victorian market was demolished in about 1975. The new markets lasted just over forty years. They moved out to Witton in May 2018 and were cleared in 2018–19.

Today the ground is the cleared Smithfield regeneration site, with a public square planned over the buried moat. The market built to replace the lords of Birmingham’s house has gone, and the moat it buried is now a protected monument.

Why it disappeared

Redevelopment

By the 1960s the Victorian market was congested and in poor condition, and the fish market in Bell Street had been demolished in 1958. The Corporation built a new Wholesale Markets complex on the site, and the old covered market was demolished in about 1975. Those markets in turn closed in 2018, when the trade moved to Witton.