The great markets-Smithfield, Billingsgate, Covent Garden, the Stocks- were seen as central to London life, and somehow emblematic of it. Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour of the People in London (1903), revealed that in Petticoat Lane, on Sunday morning, could be found “cotton sheeting, old clothes, worn-out boots, damaged lamps, chipped china shepherdesses, rusty locks,” together with sellers of “Dutch drops” and Sarsaparilla wine, bed knobs, door knobs and basins of boiled peas. Here, in the early twentieth century, Tubby Isaacs set up his stall selling bread and jellied eels: the same small firm remains there at the beginning of the next century. In nearby Wentworth Street there were bakers and fishmongers. In Brick Lane were sold “pigeons, canaries, rabbits, fowls, parrots or guinea pigs.” Hungerford Market was known for its vegetables, Spitalfields for its potatoes, and Farringdon for its watercress. In Goodge Street there was a market for fruit and vegetables, while in Leather Lane tools, appliances and peddlers’ wares were sold together with “old bed knobs, rusty keys or stray lengths of iron piping.” Leadenhall Market, established since the thirteenth century, was first known for its supply of woollen cloths while its main courtyard was used alternately by butchers and tanners. Clare Market, off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was notorious for its butchers. Bermondsey Market was known for hide and skin, Tattersall’s for horses. Fish-wives held their own market along the Tottenham Court Road “with paper-lanthorns stuck in their baskets on dark nights.” The litany of markets is a litany of London itself-Fleet Market, Newgate Market, Borough Market, Lisson Grove Market, Portman Market, Newport Market, Chapel Market in Islington.
The metaphor of the market has now spread all over London, and across its trading systems, and yet it springs from places such as Brick Lane, Petticoat Lane, Leather Lane, Hoxton Street and Berwick Street. All these, and almost a hundred others, survive still as street-markets, the majority of them on sites where they first flourished centuries before. Here the poor buy at fifth hand what the rich bought at first hand. Some street-markets, however, have vanished. Rag Fair, by Tower Hill, has gone: a woebegone place, where “raggs and old clothes” were sold beside rotten vegetables, stale bread and old meat, it disappeared beneath its own waste.
CHAPTER 36
Waste Matter
What the voracious city devours, it must eventually disgorge in rubbish and excrement. Thomas More, who as under-sheriff knew the malodorous and insanitary conditions of London at first hand, decided that in his Utopia (1516) anything sordidum (dirty) or morbum (diseased) should be forbidden within the walls. In the early sixteenth century, this was indeed a utopian state.
The sanitary conditions of London in the centuries of Roman civilisation, when a system of public baths and latrines helped actively to promote urban cleanliness, were as good as anywhere within the empire. Yet it would be unwise to depict a marbled city without stain; refuse heaps, containing the bones of oxen, goats, pigs and horses, were found in the open areas of the city still within the walls, although it is likely that semi-domesticated ravens were always ready to consume offending garbage littered upon the street. The practice of throwing the contents of urine jars out of the window is well known, as is attested by numerous court cases. In the entrance to Roman taverns and workshops, however, have been uncovered large stone vessels which can best be described as urinals. Here is the first physical evidence of London’s toilet facilities (in one such site, along Fish Street Hill, was found a bag of cannabis which also testifies to the longevity of the drug culture of the city).
