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From scallops to skyscrapers: what does the closure of Billingsgate Fish Market mean for Tower Hamlets?

Tower Hamlets street markets have long adapted to its changing, entrepreneurial population. 800 years old, what does the fish market’s closure represent?

Waking up in the still inky hours of early morning to visit Billingsgate’s fish market still feels novel, despite having gone four or five times of late. I park next to Poppies Fish & Chip van to join the nocturnal workforce that feeds our city. 

Throngs of people splash across the floor covered in a thin film of icy, fishy water to the soundscape of bartering and banter. As money quickly passes hands, and fish of kinds I’ve never seen before are spliced, weighed and packed, there’s an undeniable feeling that important business is taking place in this 800-year-old institution. But it won’t last forever. 

Billignsgate traders laying out different kinds of prawn for sale.
© David Gill

At the end of last year, the City of London Corporation voted to rescind their plan to move Smithfield and Billingsgate Fish Market to a new purpose-built site in Dagenham. Both markets will operate on the existing sites until 2028 when they are due to close for good. 

With the original relocation announced in 2022 as part of a major ‘regeneration scheme’ and £308 million of the £1 billion ringfenced for the Dagenham Dock site already spent, the Corporation’s sudden vote to end responsibility of the markets has come as a shock to all. 

A trader on his phone outside Billingsgate fish market
© David Gill

Billingsgate Fish Market, the UK’s biggest inland fish market, is still owned and managed by the City of London, despite moving from Lower Thames Street to its current location on the Isle of Dogs, Poplar in 1982. 

As the freehold owners, Tower Hamlets Council receives an annual ground rent of “the gift of one fish” from the Corporation. As far back as Mayor John Bigg’s administration, the land has been earmarked for mixed-use housing. The relationship whiffs of satire; according to the Trust for London, Tower Hamlets is the most income-deprived borough in the capital and the City of London is the least. 

A varity of fish laid out for sale at Billingsgate fish market
© David Gill

Although there are murmurs of a new site being found for Smithfields meat market, nothing has so far been proposed for Billingsgate, leaving a lot of confused traders, fishermen and restaurateurs in the lurch. Where will the southeast of England get its fish and what will happen to the workers? 

The market is not only a crucial distribution centre for the fish the UK consumes but also a historic symbol of the East End’s relationship with trade, entrepreneurship, and its markets. Tower Hamlets Council calls its ‘choice of vibrant, diverse and contrasting street markets’ second to none in the capital. 

It is home to some of the country’s most iconic markets including Brick Lane and Columbia Road Flower Market, which are hotspots for tourism just as much as they are for trade. It also hosts some of the country’s oldest markets, including Petticoat Lane founded in the 1750s by the Huguenots, and Roman Road, which when first recorded as a market in 1887 by Charles Booth was described as ‘one of the greatest market streets in London.’ 

Its diversity of markets reflects the diversity of its inhabitants and visitors. The docks are the mouthpiece of the Thames – the city’s artery through which trade, and the various migrations that have powered it, have arrived.

boots of a trader at billingsgate fish maket
© David Gill

Tower Hamlets, the historic East End of London, is a borough defined by the different populations that have lived there and the subsequent markets they have been founded to feed them. As the architect Thomas Aquilina wrote in the essay Walking Whitechapel High Street published in The Alternative Guide to London Boroughs, ‘the high street has always been a way of diagnosing Tower Hamlets’.

The demographic of Billingsgate’s traders and customers also reflects this. On my first couple of visits to the market, I’m taken under the wing of Greg Essex, more commonly known as Big Greg, the celebrity face of the market (and Uncle to fellow celeb, Joey Essex), whose large stature matches his large, dazzlingly white smile. 

Big Greg tells me that the market was opened up to the general public when it moved to the current site in the 80s. Although it’s mainly restaurants, hotels and shops buying wholesale from the market, it is also packed out by people such as Katherine, who has come all the way from Harlow to browse red bream, catfish and shrimp to cook at home – fish she was brought up on in her native country, Senegal. 

‘The worst customers are the white ones’, Greg tells me, ‘because they buy a packet of smoked salmon and a box of frozen prawns and that’s that. Asian and black communities have much stronger fish cultures, so are buying fish from all over the world by the boxes.’ 

Big greg a trader at Billingsgate
Big Greg © David Gill

According to Greg, it’s the smaller fishmongers that cater to these ethnically diverse demands. ‘The smaller firms that rely on the public for business won’t survive on their own’, he warns gloomily.

Although there are inevitable groupings within the markets, the atmosphere is friendly and fun. Big Greg tells me that when colleagues are ill he sends care packages of fish to their families. 

Valentina and Yvonne are two of the very few female workforce at the market but both of them love their jobs. Yvonne has four children and the early hours of market life means she can still do the school run. I ask if there is any romance at the market:  “Absolutely not – they all smell bad!”. 

A female trader at billingsgate fish market looking directly into camera
Georgina (who left recently to start a family) © David Gill

According to Markets4People research, food markets provide overwhelming “community value”  – economic, social and cultural –  and yet London is developing a reputation for being ‘careless‘ with its markets. Tightening regulation, gentrification, high rents and the reign of supermarkets threaten the sustainability of many markets. 

Yet King’s College London and UCL’s oral history archive of Watney Market in Shadwell captured in 2017, captures multiple women’s overwhelmingly positive experiences of their local market. 

Marg calls it “buzzing” and loves that people constantly stop and talk to one another. Judy explains her preference to shop at street markets over supermarkets because they’re “fresher”, “cheaper”, and “if something is in season the market will have it whereas the supermarket will have it all year round”. 

Patricia, another long-standing customer, describes how the traders and punters have changed over time: “different areas have different ethnic groups. It used to be part Jewish here, part Irish, English, then West Indian, and then Asian – the Bangladeshis – and then the Eastern Europeans”. 

A Billingsgate fish trader holding a massive fish
Kumuar © David Gill

Tower Hamlets street markets have a long history of being highly adaptable, enterprising, and lifesaving amenities. This history suggests that street markets provide unique opportunities to authentically serve local communities. Rather than the specific demographics of those that use them, might the continued negligence and disappearance of markets in themselves erode Tower Hamlets’ core identity? 

Although still second best, the originally planned move to the new Dagenham site was not unpopular. As well as new and improved facilities, the location better suited many of the traders who had moved to Essex in recent years, a county the journalist Tim Burrows has described as a “Cockney frontierism”. 

Populated by East Enders who have followed the sway of the river eastwards to more affordable houses and for the most part whiter communities, Essex is the contemporary outpost of pie and mash and rhyming slang. 

A trader at Billingsgate fish market
Bobby Bush’s family business has been running at the market for 200 years © David Gill

I spoke to the traders of Micks Eels Supply Limited at Billingsgate, a family business passed down to three generations that deals in jellied, live eels, and shellfish. The founder’s grandson Keiran told me that their trade had changed over the years – there has been an increasing demand for live eels in the Chinese market and a decline in the sale of jellied eels and crabs. 

He believes this is due to changing shopping habits: more people buy fish from supermarkets and less from fish stands and popups, which used to be synonymous with football games and pubs. Keiran’s colleague admitted, ‘I don’t eat fish at all!’. 

The Kurdish owner of Billingsgate’s cafe for the last 11 years is Ali, patriarch of another of the market’s multigenerational families. Over an 8 am bacon and scallop bap, Ali tells me that his invention of a full English fry-up with scallops has kept his mixed clientele of the public, traders, workers and lorry drivers happy. 

A man sitting in  the Billingsgate fish market cafe
In the cafe © David Gill

Despite his tawdry humour, Ali is cynical: ‘There’s no point trying to move the market again – it’s already dead.’ Although other traders deny the influence, he thinks supermarkets are responsible for the dwindling use of markets like Billingsgate, in the same way that they have usurped flower markets. 

I ask his son Ugnius, who also goes by Ossy, if he’s interested in the cafe’s continuation. ‘Well, I won’t be working here. I’m doing an economics degree, so I’ll be in one of those offices soon enough!’, he grins pointing to the skyscrapers dominating the skyline through the café window.

Chefs at the billingsgate fish market cafe
In the cafe. Shimmy (on the left), top chef and has been been at at the cafe for over 20 years. Eddie (on the right), who recently left. © David Gill

There is a strong argument to decentralise major markets and other places of commerce, in the same direction as their workers, namely to the outskirts of London. The planned move to Dagenham was estimated to create a not insignificant 2,700 new jobs in the local area, and generate around £14.5 billion for the UK economy by 2049. 

But the move – and subsequent shutdown – of this historic central London market is emblematic of the creeping financialisation of our bulging city centre that pushes essential services, such as food markets, and their labourers to the city’s hinterlands, stripping high streets of much loved and needed amenities. 

The front signage of Billingsgate fish market
© David Gill

Currently, G Kellys on Roman Road – one of the last bastions of jellied eels in the area – get their eels, seafood and potatoes for their mash delivered from the market. Owner Neil Vening explains that if the market moved too far out, or indeed disappeared entirely, they would no longer be able to exist.

‘The margins wouldn’t be worth it if I was having to spend lots of time driving, and we’re too small-scale to get deliveries straight from the source.’ says Venning.

‘I’m sure the big restaurants will make it work – but there’s going to be more cars on the road as a result and more congestion, which are some of the barriers to this trade in the first place.

A fish trader sitting in the cafe on his break.
Little Jeff – fondly nicknamed ‘Shit House’ by Big Greg © David Gill

Deliveries take a lot of organisational skill, especially as Tower Hamlets Council have gotten rid of all the legitimate loading bays in the area, apart from the ones for Tesco and Iceland.’

‘Everyone was ecstatic when we launched our seafood counter [selling the likes of whelks and cockles] last year’, Vening explains, because there are so few left. 

The fact that the site of Smithfield Meat Market, also missing out on the move to Dagenham, is to be renovated into the new London Museum says something of the UK’s prioritisation of cultural simulacrums of ‘working class’ life frozen in time over the living, breathing thing. Tower Hamlets’ working class populace may look different to when Billingsgate first moved to Poplar but it is no less thriving. 

A Billingsgate trader in a white coat holding up a big fish.
Greg from Cyprus Fisheries © David Gill

In the Corporation’s most recent press release, London Fish Merchants’ Association is quoted to have found that 90% of Billingsgate’s traders will ‘continue trading when operations cease at the current site’ and that their priority is to transform these sites into a ‘new cultural destination, delivering additional housing, creating more jobs and spurring economic growth, contributing to the Government’s number one priority.’

When I spoke to the traders, they seemed less sure. Some voiced a shaky hope that an alternative site would be found, others disagreed. But many are keeping their cards close to their chest, unsure of what the future holds. Keiran quotes his grandfather’s assumption that if the market isn’t saved, ‘someone like an Amazon will swoop in and divvy up all the distribution.’ 

I’m sure he’s got a point: in 2012, the Corporation revoked the licenses of market porters, allowing for the employment of casual, cheaper labour. Is this the final coda to a slow derision of heritage and workers’ rights? Only time will tell. 

By the time I leave the market, the Poppies van is long gone and the sun is rising over the low grey and yellow warehouse, refracted in the shiny skyscrapers that tower over it in all directions. As the market packs down, the rest of the city begins to crank into action, yawning to meet the day. Kitchens nationwide are being fired up for a day’s service, and much uncertainty looms. 

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