SINCE 1848, any early morning visitor to Smithfield meat market on the edge of the City of London will have seen a familiar sight: traders loading and unloading their wares in readiness for the morning’s business. Pig, beef and lamb carcasses are noisily shunted from lorry to stall, inspected, butchered and argued over, and sold on. The traders’ uniform has changed little: shirts and ties, hats to help fight off the cold, and blood-splattered white overalls.

It is a London sight — and smell — loved by aficionados of the darker side of the capital, a million miles away from what many see as the touristy, antiseptic sprawl of Covent Garden.

It is hardly surprising, then, that a new report, proposing to close Smithfield meat market, have been greeted with shock and confusion. The controversial plans would see the closure of two London landmarks — Smithfield and Billingsgate fish market — and the creation of what the report calls a “dynamic food park”.

This would sell meat, fish and vegetables, either on the site of New Spitalfields vegetable market, on the northeastern edge of London, or at the New Covent Garden site, south of the Thames at Nine Elms, which replaced the old Covent Garden market in 1974. This ambitious plan would merge wholesale and consumer goods under one roof.

Not surprisingly, the plans have met with a mixed reception. The Smithfield traders — many now run by third and fourth generations — are firmly against the move. Others question the feasibility of a market that sells meat, fish and vegetables to both trade and consumers.

“We’re staying” is the blunt message from the Smithfield Tenants Association, the historic body that represents the interests of the market’s 40-odd stallholders. “Our traders signed ten-year leases a couple of years ago, the market has had £50 million spent on refurbishment and, after foot-and-mouth and BSE, traders are just getting back to a secure footing,” says a spokesperson for the association.

Those who work in the market itself aren’t the only group against the plans. The area around the meat market has grown into an established late-night staging post for generations of drinkers, clubbers and insomniacs.

Trevor Gulliver, co-proprietor of the award-winning restaurant St John, fears the worst: “The area would change completely. The 24-hour mixture of work and play would disappear, and that may leave the area with too many chain bars and chain restaurants. At 3am you’ve got rap stars rubbing shoulders on the pavement with burly traders. A great city should have areas like this.”

The far-ranging report, entitled A Review of London Wholesale Markets, written by a farmer, Nicholas Saphir, pulls no punches. “What we once looked on as quaint parts of the environmental texture will change over time,” says the author. “And can we really have meat carcasses hanging around public highways in a few years’ time?” Saphir, a veteran of numerous farming and food bodies, suggests that similar problems of access, congestion and environmental issues afflict Billingsgate fish market too, currently located out to the east of London. As the area around it becomes more residential this problem is likely to get worse.

According to Saphir and his team, without radical change, the long-term future of any food market in the capital is at risk. “For the trade, having to go from place to place for meat, fish and vegetables doesn’t make economic sense — and the city pays in extra traffic congestion,” he says.

But is such a big and ambitious trade and consumer market really workable? Henrietta Green, founder of the Food Lovers’ Fairs and inspiration behind many farmers’ markets, says: “I think the principle of a large, integrated market — like Rungis in Paris — is a great idea. But the integration of a trade and consumer market may be difficult to achieve.”

Green claims that the audiences are different — and while some trade suppliers will happily spend 20 minutes chatting to a single customer buying one fish, most will not. “Many customers may well be intimidated by dealing with wholesale suppliers,” she adds.

Smithfield tenants say that far from their trade being a “quaint part of the environmental texture” health inspectors “crawl all over the place”. It is naive, too, to think that meat, fish and vegetables can be sold from one site without a further, and more serious, health and safety challenge emerging, they add.

What do chefs think? After all, in Saphir’s vision, they are key customers in any proposed market. Chris Galvin, chef director of Conran Restaurants, says it sounds a good idea but cautions that the supply chain is not simple any more: “Many chefs get their meat direct from farms, and their fish from ports.” Galvin thinks we should investigate a consolidated market in Kent, “giving us the chance to export to the Continent, and move goods around the UK”.

Saphir, however, is confident that consumers “will be joining the French, the Germans and the Scandinavians in going to the supermarkets for the basics of life, but use markets for more specialist, artisan produce”.

While for Saphir, Smithfield is an uneconomic throwback, many others ask: in an increasingly standardised food world, can the capital really afford to lose such gems?

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