Foolishly, I have recently stumbled across the Rank Organization’s “Look at Life” mini-documentaries of 1960s British life (the exercise showing why this is such an awesomely interesting time-sink is left up to the reader). Among other shorts, I came across “Look At Life: Shopping By the Ton”, which covers the “Big Three” of 1960s London wholesale food markets - Covent Garden (Produce and Flowers); Billingsgate (Fish); and Smithfields (Meat).
Of course the next step was a “Where are they now” follow-up via Wiki:
Covent Garden –> Moved (as New Covent Garden) to Nine Elms (SW London) in 1974
Billingsgate –> Moved to new complex in the Isle of Dogs in 1982
Smithfield –> Still in the same London location, Central Market apparently still in use, supposedly the General Market and Fish Market buildings are being redeveloped.
So all markets seem to be doing OK at this late date.
Alas, as for New Covent Gardens - Wiki states “Since 1990 it has been the policy of successive governments to dispose of the market as a going concern” - OTOH, “The Market serves 40% of the fruit and vegetables eaten outside of the home in London and provides ingredients to many of London’s top restaurants, hotels, schools, prisons, hospitals and catering businesses. The Flower Market, which offers an extensive range of flowers, plants, foliages, sundries and interior decorations from the UK and from around the globe, is visited by 75% of florists in London, many of whom place morning orders and return to restock during the day as needed.”
Since there was no mention of a Neo-“New Covent Garden Market”, it seems the plan is to remove a major wholesale market for fresh produce and flowers in the UK market and replace it with…pretty much nothing? Is that correct, let alone wise? (Upon re-reading, I see a mention of “Spare Land” at the Market - is there really any spare land left in 21st Century London?)
Perhaps the UKian meaning of dispose is puzzling us leftpondians.
The idea is that New Covent Garden would somehow become a privately owned enterprise rather than a government corporation, and that the transfer would be made of “a going concern.”
I’ve been there several times, the last about three months ago. It is a huge, sprawling, and very under-used site. It was (re)located there - Vauxhall/Battersea, close to the river - long before the modern property, and actually, general renaissanceof London.
Funnily enough, I know the finance director overseeing the redevelopment/sell-off.
It’s prime development land for flats, which will mostly end up in the hands of rich Chinese investors. Depressing. I believe the market will stay in some form - there’s redevelopment plans afoot here.
Of course, Covent Garden was never the only veg market in London - the 14th century Spitalfields market relocated to Leyton in the early 90s and is bigger than Covent Garden.
The biggest surprise perhaps is that the 800 year old Smithfields meat market hasn’t gone the same way as the others and is sitting on prime development land in Clerkenwell.
When I was a teenager I was living near the original Covent Garden. This was an adventure playground for a young lad; with the chaotic narrow streets jammed with lorries delivering and collecting fruit and veg; the wholesalers shouting their wares; lorry drivers cursing and sometimes coming to blows, and, at the top, the Covent Garden Opera House, with the toffs in DJs and the ladies in full evening dress complete with jewels. The covered area (now a tourist trap) in the middle, was a flower market, full of colour and scent. The whole thing only operated between the late evening and about 6am, and the pubs stayed open all night. I could earn as much as half-a-crown (12½p) helping to load 1cwt (112lb) sacks of spuds on to a lorry.
Sadly it just couldn’t continue on that site and it got moved to Lambeth. Now, modern sales, logistics and marketing, with supermarkets ruling the roost, have made these markets mostly redundant. The European and domestic growers deliver directly to monster sheds operated by supermarkets and wholesalers.
Spitalfields and Smithfield, although threatened many times, have survived because they cater for the smaller businesses in London The architecture is also heavily protected. Whereas, in my day at Covent Garden, we would have potatoes coming in from one end of the country, offloaded, sold on, reloaded, and sent off to the other end; the present pattern is for the veg (at Spitalfields) and the meat (at Smithfield) to arrive from all over the world, but be distributed largely to small enterprises in the Greater London area.
I have delivered to Smithfields many times, and the mixture of dozens of huge lorries from all over Europe, scores of small vans from butchers and caterers, and the night clubbers with micro dresses and luminous hair, stumbling from the clubs all around the area is something to behold.
So what I gather from the redevelopment plans, looks like they plan to build a set of market buildings on a small portion of the existing market grounds, and other non-market development (commercial and residental) on the remaining area.
Since the existing market was opened only in 1974 (recent times when you consider the original building according to wiki was build in 1830), did they just over-estimate at the time how much space was needed for the New Covent Gardens, or did the market just undergo a slow contraction over the following decades?
London’s population (and perhaps the city generally) was in decline then, and had been for some years; land was cheap and getting cheaper - extraordinary now to think you couldn’t give local auth property away (working class leaving for new towns, etc):
In terms of the flower market, I have no idea but I suspect - like most things - the rise of large supermarkets has caused massive issues for florists.
For example, there is a massive Sainsburys immediately adjactent to NCG on Wandsworth Road and I bet that sells more flowers than several florists.
The florists definitely get their wares from new covent garden though. Not sure about the supermarkets, but they’re probably supplied by companies who might also use new covent garden. It’s not intended for casual buyers, but retailers.
My guess would be that they completely failed to foresee a world in which many many businesses would just be able to pick up the phone to their wholesaler(s) and have a truck drop off their order to them at dawn the next day. In the old days it was very hard to have a functioning ‘market’ without it all physically being located in the same place, but that has become less of an issue. The Parisian equivalent of these markets (Les Halles) closed completely many years ago, and I suspect the continued existence of the London markets is partly to do with the legal structures of the organisations that run them (Covent Garden Market Authority and the City of London Corporation for Billingsgate & Smithfield).