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The best shopping in London: the streets and quarters each known for one thing, and the stores big enough to be a day out. Filter by what you are after and by what you want to spend.
The country's biggest wholesale meat market, working from midnight to seven in the morning under two Victorian iron roofs.
Food & drinkBargains
There has been a market on this ground for more than eight hundred years, and the halls it works in now are Sir Horace Jones's, commissioned in 1866 and finished in 1868 for £993,816: painted ironwork and glass, built over the railway so meat could be delivered from anywhere in the country straight underneath.
It is a wholesale market, but you can walk it. Customers go along the central avenues and buy from what is on display; going inside a unit needs clean protective clothing, for the hygiene rules. The hours are the other way round from everything else - midnight to seven, busiest between three and five - which makes it the best thing in London to do when you cannot sleep. Photography, even for yourself, needs permission from the market first. The City Guides run a public walking tour once a month, an hour and a half from Barbican station at seven in the morning, booked ahead.
Christmas Eve is the day to come. G Lawrence & Co hold the meat auction in Grand Avenue from ten in the morning, selling off what is left before the holiday - whole rib joints, turkeys, gammons - cash only, shouted, and packed. The sell-off is as old as the market's habit of not letting meat sit, which in the centuries before refrigeration was the whole business.
It is expected to move. The City of London, which runs it, named Albert Island in the Royal Docks on 3 December 2025 as its preferred site, under the name New Smithfield. An Act of Parliament is needed before the market can stop trading here, and planning permission from Newham, so there is no date.
| Monday | 00:00 – 07:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 00:00 – 07:00 |
| Wednesday | 00:00 – 07:00 |
| Thursday | 00:00 – 07:00 |
| Friday | 00:00 – 07:00 |
| Saturday | Closed |
| Sunday | Closed |
Hours from the page that lists them, checked 22 September 2026.
Closed on bank holidays and on 25 and 26 December and 1 January. Free parking under the Rotunda between 21:00 and 09:00. The Fox & Anchor on Charterhouse Street opens at 07:00, as the market shuts - it kept an early licence for the men coming off shift, and still opens for breakfast.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.