A relocation to a new site marked the end of an era and sparked nostalgia for workers
On the eve of the closure of old Billingsgate in 1982, the Observer took a valedictory tour of the fish market.
Things had changed since the market opened in 1876, built on the site of a former Saxon port. Demand for Argentine red snapper and Hong Kong wong fah from health-conscious Londoners just about kept things ticking over, but Britain was eating less fish, meaning Billingsgate’s work for the day finished at 10am instead of 3pm. Porter numbers had dwindled, too, from 1,200 in 1929 to 240, and while women used to be commonplace, by 1982 there were none. The work was easier, 79-year-old Jackie explained, sitting on a truckload of mussels in creaking yellow PVC trousers, staring across the river ‘half-drowned in nostalgia’. When he started out in 1934 there were ‘no trolleys… Used to carry 22, 23 stone on your head.’
But much of the world conjured by Sally Fear’s photographs and Ian Walker’s pen portrait recalled the market’s heyday: the dim pre-dawn, ledger books, slippery cod and the ‘Dickensian steam room’ for boiling shellfish; even a few of the leather and wood ‘bobbin hats’ used for moving boxes of fish in the pre-trolley era (tourists offered Manny £400 for his). There was also still a population of casual workers and kids gathered under the market clock, keen to earn no-questions-asked cash. John, 60, was a rough sleeper who earned £5 a day working in the ice store; he feared the more regulated environment at the new West India Dock site would make that impossible.
‘Billingsgate guvnor’ Don Tyler was reassuring – there would be minimal change, he promised; a few forklifts, new trolleys – but there was a strong sense an era was ending. Porter Ray Barrett prophesied that thawing the vast cold store beneath the market hall would bring disaster: 60 years’ worth of 15-20ft blocks of ice melting would ‘bring Billingsgate crashing down’. The great thaw did not actually spell the end for the building: these days it’s an ‘event space’.
