Smithfield Market is an anomaly. The other great markets of the nineteenth-century metropolis – Covent Garden, Leadenhall, Billingsgate, Spitalfields – have all been redeveloped as shopping malls or exhibition halls, their market traders banished to vast, anonymous suburban sheds, where articulated lorries can better deliver the capital's fruit, flowers and fish to the wholesaler. Smithfield, on the other hand, survives in the very heart of the city, a majestic cathedral of stone, iron and glass, stubbornly dedicated to its original purpose – the sale and distribution of ‘dead meat’. Some question Smithfield's long-term future, arguing that the Victorian buildings are too inconveniently located; too crowded; outmoded. Indeed, a determined campaign to convert lesser-known parts of the site into modern office-space may well succeed. Still, before we decry the developers for levelling London's much-cherished heritage, it is worth remembering that these buildings we admire – the work of City of London architect, Horace Jones, opened in 1868 – were themselves constructed to erase all traces of an older and more ancient market. The creation of Horace Jones’ Smithfield was a ‘redevelopment’ on a grand scale – and, as Robyn Metcalfe explains, one which was some 50 years in the making.

Metcalfe's book is subtitled The London Food Market 1800–1855. It is not about the ‘dead meat’ market but its predecessor, the live cattle market, which the City of London would reluctantly close and relocate to a larger site in Copenhagen Fields, Islington, in 1855. Dickens would famously describe the filth, noise and squalor of the old market's pens, overcrowded with animals awaiting sale and slaughter, in both Oliver Twist (1838) and Great Expectations (1861): ‘the shameful place . . . all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me’ (Great Expectations, chapter 20). G.W.M. Reynolds likewise commenced his infamous penny-dreadful, The Mysteries of London (1844), in the same ‘foul and filthy arena’ amidst the ‘labyrinth of narrow and dirty streets’ which enclosed the market's grounds. These were the thoroughfares that harboured the butchers, slaughterers, tripe-dressers and others who relied upon the market for their livelihoods (blood, intestines and offal providing raw material for the manufacture of everything from violin strings to perfume). Metcalfe's book is not, however, an exposé of the gory and gruesome. Certainly, it contains some of those details – I particularly like the MP who affirmed that the condition of market and its slaughterhouses sent ‘a general vomit through the House’ – and the book shows us why Smithfield became widely acknowledged as a public nuisance. But the author's principal objective is to take us through 50 years of various attempts to address that nuisance, from unsuccessful bills in parliament to the final decisive royal commission. Most of these efforts championed one of two options – either expanding the existing market (which might exacerbate the problem) or relocating it to a more suburban site (which might prove a commercial failure) – ‘improve or remove’. The City of London, which always preferred ‘improvement’, has often been portrayed as a stubborn, self-interested authority with little interest in the greater good of the metropolis. Metcalfe, however, presents a more nuanced account, and takes pains both to show the City's efforts to improve Smithfield before the 1850s, and to present the divergent and remarkably disparate views of the various interested parties, including the shopkeepers, innkeepers, butchers, drovers, salesmen and others who all had a stake in the smooth running of the meat market.

The book will certainly interest London historians and also provides some useful nuggets of information. How many readers will know that ‘forestalling’ originally meant keeping cattle back from reaching the market, in the hope of artificially increasing their value? I also warmed to brief details about ‘The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks’, a Georgian gentleman's club with the motto ‘Beef and Liberty’ and, more generally, the Englishman's ‘honest reverence for beef’. There are a couple of peculiar non-sequiturs buried in the text – for example, where Metcalfe proposes that a select committee's witness is suggesting turning the market into a ‘pleasure garden’, because he uses the phrase ‘an open square for pleasure’. The length of the notes also seems a little disproportionate to the relatively short length of the book. But these are trivial objections to an otherwise interesting and informative work. This is a fascinating read for anyone wanting to learn more about an important, hitherto neglected aspect of the growth and development of the Victorian metropolis.