STEAK A CLAIM
Currently home to the UK’s biggest wholesale meat market, Smithfield is about to become central London’s best new place to bring home the bacon, David Taylor discovers
Smithfield will become one of the best-connected areas in London when Crossrail opens next year, with a third of the population of England suddenly within a 45-minute journey of this historic north-west corner of the City of London.
Bursting with bars, restaurants and tourists, parts of Smithfield have nevertheless retained a quiet residential feel. However, the “culture club effect” is about to change all that.
The Museum of London is planning its move from London Wall, half a mile away, into its new home in redeveloped Smithfield Market’s fine Victorian buildings. Tate Modern, in the old Bankside Power Station, is one London pearl around which new residential life grew, while Central Saint Martin’s art and design school saw King’s Cross reborn with new homes and mixed-use developments. The Museum of London plans to do the same with its huge new gallery space in Smithfield, using Stanton Williams, the
award-winning architects who carefully curated the design for Central Saint Martins, where they incorporated the Victorian roots of the old granary building and added on a stunning and sympathetically designed new campus.
A short walk from the City and Barbican, Smithfield connects the Square Mile to Farringdon, Clerkenwell and beyond. Built on burial grounds and claypits it is rich in history, with a medieval street plan of courtyards, lanes, alleys and remnants of monasteries. St Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded in 1123, ticks on here, while in the listed meat market buildings, porters in white coats and hats dash along carrying carcasses and look forward to a pint with their breakfast fry-up at local pubs. Museum of London director Sharon Ament believes the move will transform the area. “We anticipate the change will be as profound or more so than Bankside,” she says. The Victorian General Market buildings in West Smithfield have been the subject of debate and many aborted redevelopment schemes for years. “The buildings need to be inhabited and brought back to life again and given a profoundly new purpose, which we will bring to it,” says Ament.
The museum, which opened in 1976 and receives about 1.25 million people visiting a year, documents the history of London from prehistoric to present day. With the move, it aims to become one of the capital’s top five most-visited museums. The scheme will open up the historic building at West Smithfield, placing galleries both temporary and permanent beneath the 50ft wide Smithfield dome, and is intended to provide space for other similar institutions, along with a rooftop restaurant, café and terrace.
The project is already attracting residential schemes. Ament says the area will be more “liveable”. There is talk of the ripple effect reaching Hatton Garden jewellery quarter and even as far as City Road. The recent reopening of Fabric nightclub close to the market is already adding to the buzz.