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“a unique texture”

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In Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place Tim Cresswell presents “one version of what place-writing can look like in the early twenty-first century” (2). Sidestepping assumed oppositions between “phenomenological” and “materialist” approaches to the concept of place, Cresswell puts forward an eclectic approach loosely based on ideas of “assemblage” (166, 5). Places are “where things (but also memories, emotions and discourses, etc.) gather” (170). As assemblages, their multiple constituent parts can change “whilst the whole remains” (5). 

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Materiality (buildings, commodities, objects, people, air)

Practice (meetings, rituals, habits)

Meaning (stories, symbols, myths, rumours)

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Over time distinctive combinations, patterns and rhythms of these elements accumulate in a specific location, producing a “place”. Fixed material forms – buildings, monuments, trees – offer the clearest and most tangible signs of a place. Material things on the move are also crucial; the movement of animal flesh and the (intentionally designed) flow of air are, for example, distinctive of Smithfield. Place is also ‘performed’ through social practice. Most places would seem alien without the rhythms of the working, playing or living day. And within these rhythms there are individual behaviours and habits that recur again and again in certain places: people queuing at a stall or lingering amongst the bins to smoke. Most public places have distinctive patterns of social practice over longer time frames: festivals, celebrations, ‘busy seasons’ and ‘down times’. And finally specific stories, meanings and memories gather around and “stick” to a place (196). Rumours, myths and moral tales are latched on to features of the physical environment, reiterated through social practice. A place can come to represent a political ideal, social narrative or lost world.

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Place is “a textile where threads of different elements of the world combine to produce a unique texture” (171). In this metaphor, the threads remind us that places are made of their connections to other places (Doreen Massey) while the “unique texture” reminds us that places are distinctive and experiential (Yi-Fu Tuan). The site of Smithfield began its life devoid of texture; a “smooth-field” on the edge of the Roman city prized for being open, empty and flat (Forshaw, 1980: 18). Over a millennium the site gathered particular associations and patterns of social practice; cattle were sold, fairs were celebrated and heretics were hung. Physical structures of various degrees of permanence were erected on the site. The physical and symbolic space of ‘Smithfield’ was claimed and contested for different purposes and different groups. It became a place: known of, spoken about, recorded in text and image.

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If place is a tapestry then Smithfield has a rougher, denser and coarser weave than most. As things – meat, people, discourses, aspirations – have moved through Smithfield they have come into “friction” (Tsing, 2011) with this “unique texture” (Cresswell, 2020). By the 19th century the site was well known for violence, brutality and raucousness. In Great Expectations Pip describes the visceral effect of passing through the live cattle market: “I came into Smithfield and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me” (cited in Phillpotts, 2010: 39).  Both physically and symbolically Smithfield became sticky and rough: a place more socially contested and symbolically loaded than most. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion Sara Ahmed writes: “when the body of another becomes an object of disgust, then the body becomes sticky” and its movement is curtailed by the emotions and affects that ‘stick’ to it (Ahmed, 2004: 92). Smithfield’s associations ‘stick’ to those associated with it: “A Smithfield Gazette article reveals the market worker’s gratitude to café’s that accept them in their bloodied whites” (cited in Wilson, 2019: 282).

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Reflecting on the old Billingsgate Market, Caroline Steel describes how the smell of fish “lingered long after the market closed in 1982” (Steel, 2008: 116). What will linger at Smithfield? Whilst the fixed material forms of buildings might appear to be the most stable, enduring and defining element of a place, this is not necessarily the case. After all, the movement of animal flesh has defined Smithfield for longer than Horace Jones’s Victorian market buildings. Stories of brutality and associations with debauchery may outlive the trading of meat.

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“Local theory”

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Cresswell is less interested in ideas “about place” than in paying attention to the “ideas arising from this place” (2). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “presence of mind” and Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” he sets out on a project of “local theory”:

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“[local theory] is different from traditional forms of place-writing in its willingness to take theoretical tangents from the specificity of a particular locale. It is different from much theory in its insistence on staying where we are – staying located […] local theory involves connecting what is there – in Maxwell Street [or, Smithfield] – to what lies beyond. It traces unruly trajectories in and out of place” (2 - 13)

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‘Local theory’ is a way of writing and thinking about place that mirrors the qualities of place itself: “the gathering quality of place necessitates writing in a way that follows the unruly trajectories that pass through it” (6). I’m particularly interested in these “unruly trajectories”. At Smithfield this might mean retracing the path of a cow carcass to a farm in Argentina or tailing an ex-market worker to a high street shop in Kent. It could mean tracing the provenance or fate of a myth that once animated the market floor.

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From colonialism and nationalism to ‘health and safety’ and heritagisation, Smithfield’s history has been characterised by encounters with ideas and processes that have stretched far beyond the market-place. Cresswell’s “local theory” re-enforces the value of following these “unruly trajectories” in both a geographical and methodological sense. The market’s fate has never been certain and each of these projects represented a move to shape its future and to define its place in a changing city. As Caroline Wilson has argued, unable to significantly control the fate of the market and the city around it, Smithfield’s workers “must co-opt the projects of the other, co-exist with them in constant, aggressively humorous struggle” (Wilson, 2019: 284). In other words, these ideas gained traction in the market as they came into “friction” with its “unique texture”.

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Creswell’s model of place – his “local theory” – is firmly rooted in the market. His emphasis on ‘gathering’ and ‘dispersing’ echoes the markets material practices. In a sense his model is also reflective of a particular kind of market – the street market – and a somewhat romanticised vision of its seemingly spontaneous and informal daily “emergence”. At points his model of place as “gathering” can slip into passivity. Who is doing the gathering? Who is allowed to gather and how long are they allowed to stay? A local theory of place from Smithfield would reflect the particularities of the wholesale meat market, its occupational categories and material processes: not just “gathering” and “dispersing” but “pulling”, “pitching”, “haggling” and “cutting”.

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writing place

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“I must get back to the world of the creative mind: otherwise, in the world of pies and shin beef, I die”. Sylvia Plath’s Food Diary, 3/4/1957

Cresswell understands “writing place” as a creative process of collecting, assembling and “making” (11). In researching Smithfield I engage in an ongoing practice of collecting images, ideas, narratives and memories that have gathered at the market over the last 150 years. And then, in my process of note-taking, archiving and writing, I present these pieces a-new. Creating a new assemblage which re-presents Smithfield. Hopefully capturing something of its “unique texture”; its rhythm; its connection to other places; the dynamics of change and continuity linking its past, present and future. Like Cresswell, the ‘pieces’ I gather and re-present are largely the observations, records and memories of others:

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“I do not often describe Maxwell Street as I have encountered it. Rather I perform a description of descriptions – an account of a place over a hundred years through the descriptions of others.” (5-6).

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One of my main sources for reconstructing Smithfield of the past is a collection of oral history interviews in the British Library (Food: From Source to Salespoint). These interviews are long-form life stories with individuals who have worked in the market. They provide details of market things, events and people that have not otherwise been recorded (in the 1950s new techniques of farming in Belgium swamped the meat market with Rabbits that were “giant like big white cats”). They also provide an insight into the workings of memory and nostalgia in and around the market (were the rabbits really that big? What image of the past are these Belgian rabbits being used to construct?).

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Biographical detail and context will almost certainly have to be lost as I assemble these personal reflections into a reconstruction and analysis of place. Reflections on place from a life-story will become signs of life in a place-story. Even though these interviews were made for the public record, listening to them feels like eavesdropping. Transcribing them into text to ‘use’ feels like ransacking a family photo album. The balance between lingering in place (whether in the flesh or in the archive) and creatively re-constructing it feels like a fine line to tread.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, S. 2014. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Cresswell, T. 2019. Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place. University of Chicago Press.

Forshaw, A., & Bergstrom, T. (1980). Smithfield: Past and Present. Heineman, London.

Philpotts, T. (2010) Mad Bulls and Dead Meat: Smithfield Market as Reality and Symbol. Dickens Studies Annual, 41, 25-44

Steel, C. 2013. Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Random House.

Tsing, A. L. 2011. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.

Wilson, C. (2019). ‘We’re all mad down here.’ Liminality and the carnivalesque in Smithfield Meat Market. In London's Urban Landscape, ed. C. Tilley, 263-300. UCL Press.

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