Meat in the City (The Expanding Market Place)

 

Whilst this image above is not of Birmingham, the scene, setting and statement are easily qualified for any major city in the UK.

We get a sense from this beast market scene of the hustle between traders, customers, and local authorities, together with the imagined yet pervasive odours, noise and organised chaos from the herded beasts. An earthy atmosphere indeed,  surrounded by inner-city dwellers, living with the weekly incursion of out-of-town droves, including people, cattle, sheep, pigs and geese as well as numerous other livestock. Prior to the railways in Birmingham, around 1838, these animals would have travelled hundreds of miles in some cases, especially the cattle from Anglesey, an arduous task for man and beast, but a necessary one that had occurred and prevailed over many hundreds of years.

I envision a somewhat hostile setting with people striving by fair means or foul to make a profit and/or a living, hoping for a top price or a bargain using wit and banter and a language of their own, often used to confuse the market authority.

The top hat and coat-tailed gentry are evident, bankers maybe, with an overview of business and quality of merchandise, making a weekly visit, part social, part business, part escape from other daily demands.

The round hat and smock of the Drover with a stick can be seen, managing the beast order with skill and guile, eager to get business done, securing the funds and catching up with gossip at The Drovers Arms on Bradford Street.

Other hats, including bowlers and caps, suggest personnel with other businesses linked to the marketplace, no doubt sometimes devious in its nature, a place to find the renowned scally, the outright thug, the joker and a place to meet the like-minded. The hat serves as a mode of identification, purpose and intention.

The Drover was expected to be an honourable man, with the abilities of strength and resilience, whilst trustworthy and astute, and likely, a folk hero of reputation from a far-off place, both tough and poetic and versed in mountain lore and legend, myths and stories.

The Drover statue at Llandovery

Sentimental maybe, but why not? Wales was a far-off place to many, and replete in folk tales. Yet also, there were, no doubt characters of dubious renown, the marketplace, with its energy and excesses, created good picking for the opportunists. Even the occasional Drover was open to temptation.

There were many 'slaughter houses' and abattoirs in and around the city, the pervasive smells we can only imagine, but based on the odours emitting from the Bissell/Barford Street Abattoir today, we can safely suggest it was extremely rural and rustic and certainly earthy.

The late 19th-century map of Birmingham below shows the slaughter houses on Gloucester Street, and accounts from the Birmingham History Forum mention slaughterhouses on Bordesley Street, Meriden Street, Chapel Street and Rea Street, all in Digbeth and Deritend

Slaughterhouses near St Martins

The City Meat Market is the large building on the right. It was built in 1897 so quite new when this photo was taken. It cost £127,833 and covered 3.5 acres. The tower was in fact a water tower and the round building was the Round House where I first started work in 1952. The Architecture was typically Victorian and designed to look more like something from the Middle East. Inside were wrought ironwork pillars and galleries. Today buildings like that would be preserved but the then City Engineer Mr Manzoni swept many of these iconic examples of our past away. If anyone has more photos of the market I'd love to see them. (From Birmingham History Forum)

If not Birmingham, this would have been a
common mid-19th century scene in many cities.