Statement from the City of London Corporation which is closing them down:
> Chris Hayward, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the
> decision represented a "positive new chapter" for the markets as it "empowers
> traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their
> long-term business goals".
This is a great statement. Like firing people to free them up to find jobs that better align with their desire for employment.
Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?
Maybe we shouldn’t be casting stones from the HN glass house, because literally every other startup here has a mission statement that sounds as ridiculous as this
the ruling comes from up-on-high the mayor of London who does have some oversight over the city of london, and the transit of traders that utilise the market.
Need a City quant PhD to invent a mathematical analog of Black-Scholes [1] for pricing and trading the irreplaceable value of culturally significant physical spaces to future generations. Then City-like [2] institutions can compete financially for ongoing preservation rights, rather than a one-time chop shop auction.
"Preserving the irreplaceable value of ..." works great as a personal motivation or a mission statement, but terribly as an explicit rule. It's the same problem as carbon offsets - if there's a formula for converting intangible values into cold hard cash, people will exploit the definition of the intangibles to make money.
> The decision to close the markets and offer traders compensation was made by the Corporation's Court of Common Council.
> The Corporation will now have to file a Private Bill in Parliament as it seeks to absolve itself of the legal responsibility of running the markets.
The Corporation in this case is the Corporation of the City of London, which is the local government authority for the City of London, which is only the part of London that is within the walls of Roman Londinium. The Parliamentary Bill may very well not pass, in which case the Corporation may be in something of a pickle.
> the local government authority for the City of London, which is only the part of London that is within the walls of Roman Londinium
Also known as the most efficient and high volume money laundering machine ever devised by man. Do a deep dive into russian oligarch money and the City of London, from reputable journalism sources, and you won't like what you find.
Super sad, have spent a long of time in the area from riding right through the middle of it and parking my motorbike under it, to wolfing Turkish lunches and drinking in the pubs (not on the same day, drink-driving mavens). It is a bit of anomaly in the modern London, hard to get to and surrounded by roads that aren’t really fit for purpose anymore, but it’s these incongruous spots that make things interesting. I remember the butcher on the main Farringdon Road just near the Charterhouse St junction, who was somewhat of a character, scoffing at my suggestion that he would even consider buying meat from Smithfield - literally around the corner - which confused and amused me at the same time.
I note the haughty remarks of other commenters who are neither familiar with the area or the ability to read, and suggest they pay a virtual visit to the spots in question
I worked literally around the corner from there some years ago. Watch “Slow Horses” and you’ll see all those sights, including Barbican tube stop and its pedestrian bridge, Charterhouse square benches, the brutalist towers, my work’s favorite little pub, etc.
My running route would take me through the market in the mornings, only a few hours after it had closed up. I loved the smell of meat, which others would find quite offensive.
It's a lovely area, and home to one of my favourite restaurants, St Johns.
Did you run through Buyers Walk right inside the building, or do you mean Grand Ave, the short and often slippery vehicular road that cut the building in half?
Either are cool, although I like the image of you running through the actual market like Rocky Balboa in the meat locker or something
Yeah, Grand Ave I think, it was in the afternoons or evenings mostly, so everything was well cleaned up by then. No stopping to punch a meat carcass unfortunately :)
It's interesting to see how cities are handling the increasing bifurcation of wholesale and retail markets.
In Sydney, the current Fish Market is a grotty assemblage of small warehouses in what's now a prime waterfront location of the city that has become an unlikely tourist attraction, but still serves the wholesale market. They're building a new one right next to it that looks far nicer, leaves tourists much less at risk of getting impaled by a speeding forklift, and will keep the wholesalers around for at least some time since they've been promised fixed rents for the next X years: https://newsydneyfishmarket.insw.com/insw/new-sydney-fish-ma...
All other markets, though, have been shipped off to a massive complex in the industrial suburbs, designed for wholesalers with easy truck access, and with the arguable exception of Paddy's Markets (which mostly sells junk to tourists) there's not a single proper consumer retail market in the entire city. Meanwhile, over in Melbourne, there's a whole slew of them (Queen Vic, Prahran, Footscray etc) that all appear to be thriving.
Yes, although it sounds like Preston has / is / will be at risk from developers that own the land and want to build apartments.
The thing about markets like this is that once they're gone, you can never get them back again. My home town, Wellington, shut down the markets at some point in the distant past and have been trying to restart them in the more recent past to little success (think a bunch of cars parked in an uncovered car park trying to sell vegetables).
If anyone is looking for a good read, there's a great book called Arcadia, which revolves around this trend of traditional city food markets being supplanted by upscale hipster traps.
Indeed. The central Sydney locality of Haymarket is that in name only. Same for Wheat Road and The Goods Line. Wholesale fresh produce has all been in Homebush / Flemington for years now, barely accessible to anyone without a semi-trailer and the willingness to purchase a truckload. Shipping also long gone from the central spots of Walsh Bay / Barangaroo / Darling Harbour, all now relegated to Container City aka Port Botany.
What a shame. On a few occasions my wife and I woke up at ridiculous o'clock and made our way down to Billingsgate market on the underground. We'd come back with fish and a big salmon in a black bin-bag, which I'd do a progressively less horrific job of filleting each time.
Our reward would be a bacon/sausage and egg butty and a stiff cup of builder's tea.
Agreed, one of my great pleasures during COVID when I had terrible insomnia and couldn't sleep was to cycle down to Billingsgate in the morning and eat one of the fantastic bacon and scallop rolls from the cafe in the market. Definitely going to miss the place.
I had honestly made my peace with it moving to Dagenham. It makes sense for the Farringdon area, it makes sense for transport links, it even makes sense for the traders, who mostly live out that way. To close the existing markets without building a new one is cultural vandalism.
This makes me deeply sad. I use to live near to the market on St Johns Street, which is a direct route to the Smithfield. There was once a burst water main that serviced a nearby hospital that caused St Johns Street to be closed down as the flood uncovered bones which needed to be excavated and investigated. They eventually were identified as cattle bones which were a few hundred years old, from when the road was nothing but dirt and would have hundreds of animals pass along it on the way to the market for sale and slaughter.
It's also a beautiful and historic building and site.
I'm not sure what led to the decision to close it, but I can only assume it was for commercial interests of some form, and will eventually be turned into souless apartments, and the surrounding businesses, bars, pubs and nightclubs will also fall into decline.
What the betting that they will turn in to a hive of chi-chi coffe shops, gift shops and bespoke offices, like they did to Coventry Garden and borough market. Since the early 80s London has been on a death dive, with real life London being replaced by a plastic equivalent.
> The original market first traded in Lower Thames Street in the City in 1327, before moving to its current site in Poplar, east London, in 1982.
So the "850 year old" food market is actually a 42 year old market, and will likely continue to operate from a different location as it has done many times in the past.
No, this was a bit confusing. I think this may have been talking about Billingsgate, the fish market. Smithfields is a meat market, and has been at that site in one form or another for hundreds of years.
The market as an institution is 850 years old; the building that currently houses that institution is 42 years old. The market is not a place; it is the activity in which people engage in that place.
As far as I'm aware they do need an act of parliment to close it down. The one to create the market on the current site is an Act of Parliament (The Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market Act of 1860) which should protect the site from becoming anything but a place to provide Meat & Poultry
The same thing happened to Covent Garden in the 1970s - the original site was closed, a new one was opened that over time became very evidently much better suited to being a large scale wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
Everybody and their uncle bitched and moaned about it, but I think there are few people today who would argue that London would be better off if Covent Garden was still the central produce market rather than the touristic hellhole it is today.
It also feels like a result of housing/property values being so high. When a block of flats can sell for £100m (and bring in council tax money), why keep markets or build libraries. It's sad.
The whole area is full of so many personal memories; having lived, worked, and partied in & around Smithfield Market.
I live in Portugal now, but those times are so vivid. Whenever I was at the office very early, or out parting late enough, the sight of the market workers there was sobering and down to earth.
To think of it not being there, then being replaced with something nondescript, is shameful.
In and around is Farringdon Station, one of the original Tube stations, the bars & pubs (Ye Olde Mitre, The Hope, Fox & Anchor, Smiths of Smithfield, etc.) and clubs (including Fabric).
I was working in the offices above the markets, for a nascent IT company, and believe me they weren't luxurious offices but it was exciting.
If you're in Boston, the open-air Haymarket operates downtown on Fridays and Saturdays, and more-or-less has been doing so continuously for 200+ years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_(Boston) Even if you're not near downtown, the prices make it worth the trip (bring cash and bags).
What's more liveable and walking-distance than a market within walking distance from where you live? This has nothing to do with urbanism, this is purely capitalistic efficiency.
I'm complaining about places to go within walking distance, such as this market, being removed despite declarations from the city authorities that they're making the place more liveable.
Smithfield features quite heavily in “Great Expectations”. Dickens hated the place. He subscribed to a theory that a city needed good circulation, which meant that things that obstructed traffic were considered bad, and Smithfield was hugely stationary and snarked up everything around it.
Of course, he had no concept of the circulation of money as being interesting and important to the “health” of a city, but most economists since Marx do.
We spent our first year as a startup hacking on laptops in the attic of Smithfields, along with a dozen other startups. No idea if Innovation Warehouse is still up there[1]. If you arrived at work early enough they'd still be hosing the blood off the tarmac from the early morning market.
Most startups moved out to WeWork as soon as they could turn a profit. But hey, it was cheap office space in super-central London.
Oh no, that'd be awful...but good news, I just looked into it, no China/Russia investors! It's a real estate developer working with the people to get a bunch of units built to ease a historic shortage. Huzzah!
There is no way in hell anything built there will be for normal people.
That area is on the doorstep of the City, with excellent connections, it’s like the centre of a compass transport wise.
When completed, you can bet it will be 2m+ for a shoebox sized apartment, with yearly fees that would swallow any normal persons salary.
There's a billion dollar price tag being punted around and you think the resulting development is going to be aimed at and priced to reduce a housing supply shortage? Are you by chance on the market to buy a bridge?
Go for it. Econ 100 textbook bs about supply and demand are trivially dismissed by a casual examination of housing and rental prices in the US in gentrified areas. What happens when the real world intrudes on academic platitudes is rather straightforward: pricing for everything goes up and the folks who were struggling get pushed out. Nobody who couldn't afford housing in the market before the shift is served.
I'm more than open to reading anything about that! Literally anything!
Most respectfully and deferentially, I don't think "more things available makes price goes down" is a platitude or textbook or academic thing!
I must confess, the fact this Fat Tony logic and not some theory invented in an academic textbook ivory-tower divorced-from-reality impoverished-intellectual safe haven is why I cannot provide a proof: the note about the margin was an attempt to inject some levity, via a reference to Fermat!
Luxury apartments do reduce the housing shortage. Cashed up boomers can move out of the nice family home they've been living in since the kids left and upgrade/downsize.
Building the high end and having people move up helps with the high cost of construction also.
Is there any Russian money going to UK/London anymore? Or any that wasn't frozen/sanctioned that hasn't already left.
I know of trader who left London to work in Dubai to still take his Russian clients business, and apparently all Russian money is going there instead of London.
No Russian money, no sirree. Fortunately there's still plenty of housing designed to appeal to Russian-speaking investors holding passports from Vanuatu, Cyprus or St Kitts and Nevis and fat investment trusts in the Cayman Islands.
An old tradition is to be replaced with the current hot trend: selling condos as investment assets. But land speculation and development predates everything in london.
Statement from the City of London Corporation which is closing them down:
> Chris Hayward, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation, said the > decision represented a "positive new chapter" for the markets as it "empowers > traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their > long-term business goals".
This is a great statement. Like firing people to free them up to find jobs that better align with their desire for employment.
Christ, yeah - I came here to post the same quote. What kind of horrific shit does one need to go through in life to become capable of uttering that kind of horseshit with a straight face?
Maybe we shouldn’t be casting stones from the HN glass house, because literally every other startup here has a mission statement that sounds as ridiculous as this
Go to business school?
Wall Street eat your heart out; London has a proud and lengthy history of producing corporate psychopaths.
If you knew, you’d likely never be able to leave the house. Or could never go home again.
Who doesn’t love corporate bullshit?
the ruling comes from up-on-high the mayor of London who does have some oversight over the city of london, and the transit of traders that utilise the market.
Gotta hit those eco numbers.
I love the journalist who puts these quotes at the end of the article. Great journalism.
Need a City quant PhD to invent a mathematical analog of Black-Scholes [1] for pricing and trading the irreplaceable value of culturally significant physical spaces to future generations. Then City-like [2] institutions can compete financially for ongoing preservation rights, rather than a one-time chop shop auction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
"Preserving the irreplaceable value of ..." works great as a personal motivation or a mission statement, but terribly as an explicit rule. It's the same problem as carbon offsets - if there's a formula for converting intangible values into cold hard cash, people will exploit the definition of the intangibles to make money.
This is largely because we’ve built a philosophy that eschews any concept of a collective or a people or a culture or a future.
Which legal and financial instruments have defended the City of London itself from being auctioned for parts?
Subsets of culture are preserved, packetized & traded daily. Even StubHub has a "food festival" category.
Before learning that this[1] was a thing, I honestly would have interpreted your remark in passing as figurative rhetoric.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_(Lake_Havasu_Cit...
This is a gamblers ruin problem action.
> The decision to close the markets and offer traders compensation was made by the Corporation's Court of Common Council.
> The Corporation will now have to file a Private Bill in Parliament as it seeks to absolve itself of the legal responsibility of running the markets.
The Corporation in this case is the Corporation of the City of London, which is the local government authority for the City of London, which is only the part of London that is within the walls of Roman Londinium. The Parliamentary Bill may very well not pass, in which case the Corporation may be in something of a pickle.
Why meet your legal obligations if you have a chance of deleting the obligations instead? Absolute chancers.
Why stop there? Why not revoke the City’s charter altogether?
The City of London isn't legally reliant on a charter. It draws existence from 'Time Immemorial'.
Specifically it exists because it existed before 1189
> The Parliamentary Bill may very well not pass, in which case the Corporation may be in something of a pickle.
I think it's highly unlikely that it would fail.
True, but it would definitely be funny.
> the local government authority for the City of London, which is only the part of London that is within the walls of Roman Londinium
Also known as the most efficient and high volume money laundering machine ever devised by man. Do a deep dive into russian oligarch money and the City of London, from reputable journalism sources, and you won't like what you find.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/how-putins-oli...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly...
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/02/04/...
The City of London (aka the Square Mile) is literally a world unto itself. Even the Mayor of London is not the mayor of the City of London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Separate police force too.
FTFY
> The Parliamentary Bill may very well not pass, in which case the Corporation may be in something of a pickled herring.
Super sad, have spent a long of time in the area from riding right through the middle of it and parking my motorbike under it, to wolfing Turkish lunches and drinking in the pubs (not on the same day, drink-driving mavens). It is a bit of anomaly in the modern London, hard to get to and surrounded by roads that aren’t really fit for purpose anymore, but it’s these incongruous spots that make things interesting. I remember the butcher on the main Farringdon Road just near the Charterhouse St junction, who was somewhat of a character, scoffing at my suggestion that he would even consider buying meat from Smithfield - literally around the corner - which confused and amused me at the same time.
I note the haughty remarks of other commenters who are neither familiar with the area or the ability to read, and suggest they pay a virtual visit to the spots in question
I worked literally around the corner from there some years ago. Watch “Slow Horses” and you’ll see all those sights, including Barbican tube stop and its pedestrian bridge, Charterhouse square benches, the brutalist towers, my work’s favorite little pub, etc.
My running route would take me through the market in the mornings, only a few hours after it had closed up. I loved the smell of meat, which others would find quite offensive.
It's a lovely area, and home to one of my favourite restaurants, St Johns.
Did you run through Buyers Walk right inside the building, or do you mean Grand Ave, the short and often slippery vehicular road that cut the building in half?
Either are cool, although I like the image of you running through the actual market like Rocky Balboa in the meat locker or something
Yeah, Grand Ave I think, it was in the afternoons or evenings mostly, so everything was well cleaned up by then. No stopping to punch a meat carcass unfortunately :)
It's interesting to see how cities are handling the increasing bifurcation of wholesale and retail markets.
In Sydney, the current Fish Market is a grotty assemblage of small warehouses in what's now a prime waterfront location of the city that has become an unlikely tourist attraction, but still serves the wholesale market. They're building a new one right next to it that looks far nicer, leaves tourists much less at risk of getting impaled by a speeding forklift, and will keep the wholesalers around for at least some time since they've been promised fixed rents for the next X years: https://newsydneyfishmarket.insw.com/insw/new-sydney-fish-ma...
All other markets, though, have been shipped off to a massive complex in the industrial suburbs, designed for wholesalers with easy truck access, and with the arguable exception of Paddy's Markets (which mostly sells junk to tourists) there's not a single proper consumer retail market in the entire city. Meanwhile, over in Melbourne, there's a whole slew of them (Queen Vic, Prahran, Footscray etc) that all appear to be thriving.
Yes, although it sounds like Preston has / is / will be at risk from developers that own the land and want to build apartments.
The thing about markets like this is that once they're gone, you can never get them back again. My home town, Wellington, shut down the markets at some point in the distant past and have been trying to restart them in the more recent past to little success (think a bunch of cars parked in an uncovered car park trying to sell vegetables).
If anyone is looking for a good read, there's a great book called Arcadia, which revolves around this trend of traditional city food markets being supplanted by upscale hipster traps.
Indeed. The central Sydney locality of Haymarket is that in name only. Same for Wheat Road and The Goods Line. Wholesale fresh produce has all been in Homebush / Flemington for years now, barely accessible to anyone without a semi-trailer and the willingness to purchase a truckload. Shipping also long gone from the central spots of Walsh Bay / Barangaroo / Darling Harbour, all now relegated to Container City aka Port Botany.
What a shame. On a few occasions my wife and I woke up at ridiculous o'clock and made our way down to Billingsgate market on the underground. We'd come back with fish and a big salmon in a black bin-bag, which I'd do a progressively less horrific job of filleting each time.
Our reward would be a bacon/sausage and egg butty and a stiff cup of builder's tea.
Good times
Agreed, one of my great pleasures during COVID when I had terrible insomnia and couldn't sleep was to cycle down to Billingsgate in the morning and eat one of the fantastic bacon and scallop rolls from the cafe in the market. Definitely going to miss the place.
I had honestly made my peace with it moving to Dagenham. It makes sense for the Farringdon area, it makes sense for transport links, it even makes sense for the traders, who mostly live out that way. To close the existing markets without building a new one is cultural vandalism.
This makes me deeply sad. I use to live near to the market on St Johns Street, which is a direct route to the Smithfield. There was once a burst water main that serviced a nearby hospital that caused St Johns Street to be closed down as the flood uncovered bones which needed to be excavated and investigated. They eventually were identified as cattle bones which were a few hundred years old, from when the road was nothing but dirt and would have hundreds of animals pass along it on the way to the market for sale and slaughter.
It's also a beautiful and historic building and site.
I'm not sure what led to the decision to close it, but I can only assume it was for commercial interests of some form, and will eventually be turned into souless apartments, and the surrounding businesses, bars, pubs and nightclubs will also fall into decline.
What the betting that they will turn in to a hive of chi-chi coffe shops, gift shops and bespoke offices, like they did to Coventry Garden and borough market. Since the early 80s London has been on a death dive, with real life London being replaced by a plastic equivalent.
> The original market first traded in Lower Thames Street in the City in 1327, before moving to its current site in Poplar, east London, in 1982.
So the "850 year old" food market is actually a 42 year old market, and will likely continue to operate from a different location as it has done many times in the past.
No, this was a bit confusing. I think this may have been talking about Billingsgate, the fish market. Smithfields is a meat market, and has been at that site in one form or another for hundreds of years.
Edit, to help clarify as other comments also appear to get this wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithfield,_London#Market
The market as an institution is 850 years old; the building that currently houses that institution is 42 years old. The market is not a place; it is the activity in which people engage in that place.
And no laws or legislation have been passed or proposed to close down said institution, is that accurate?
As far as I'm aware they do need an act of parliment to close it down. The one to create the market on the current site is an Act of Parliament (The Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market Act of 1860) which should protect the site from becoming anything but a place to provide Meat & Poultry
“It” meaning the market or the institution?
They are in the process of absolving their legal obligation to continue operating the market.
So the market moved 40ish years ago, and now it has to move again, the institution is fine?
No, if you read the article, the City of London is washing its hands of having to relocate the institution at all.
> and will likely continue to operate from a different location
> The decision to close the markets and offer traders compensation was made by the Corporation's Court of Common Council.
It seems that they want to close the markets, not to move them
https://archive.is/eX3Q6
Apparently the plans to build the new market have fallen through
The same thing happened to Covent Garden in the 1970s - the original site was closed, a new one was opened that over time became very evidently much better suited to being a large scale wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
Everybody and their uncle bitched and moaned about it, but I think there are few people today who would argue that London would be better off if Covent Garden was still the central produce market rather than the touristic hellhole it is today.
But they're not opening a new one! They're closing the current one and telling the traders to fuck off somewhere else
> Work has already begun on turning this site into a new cultural and commercial hub, which includes the new London Museum.
Yes, come to the museum to learn about all this culture we used to have, such as an awesome market.
Farringdon station happens to be where the Thameslink line from North to South London, intersects with the East to West Elizabeth line.
As the Elizabeth Line was being finished I realised that the whole area around there is going to change hugely.
Mind you if that’s the case the station would need to be rebuilt.
The article discusses converting the market to a social space to make the most of the new Museum of London.
Am I missing something, I would have thought the new Museum of London would open as the Old one closed, not a year or so later.
And how on Earth is a new market in Dagenham spec’d as costing a large fraction of a billion quid?
Literally living out becoming an open air museum.
When money is all that matters, it makes sense (to first order) to push out everything that seems to lose money and is purely cultural.
This is the machine winning.
To second order(s) and above, erasing culture reduces the desire of folks to live and prosper in the first place.
It also feels like a result of housing/property values being so high. When a block of flats can sell for £100m (and bring in council tax money), why keep markets or build libraries. It's sad.
The whole area is full of so many personal memories; having lived, worked, and partied in & around Smithfield Market.
I live in Portugal now, but those times are so vivid. Whenever I was at the office very early, or out parting late enough, the sight of the market workers there was sobering and down to earth.
To think of it not being there, then being replaced with something nondescript, is shameful.
In and around is Farringdon Station, one of the original Tube stations, the bars & pubs (Ye Olde Mitre, The Hope, Fox & Anchor, Smiths of Smithfield, etc.) and clubs (including Fabric).
I was working in the offices above the markets, for a nascent IT company, and believe me they weren't luxurious offices but it was exciting.
Good times, and soon only memories.
If you're in Boston, the open-air Haymarket operates downtown on Fridays and Saturdays, and more-or-less has been doing so continuously for 200+ years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_(Boston) Even if you're not near downtown, the prices make it worth the trip (bring cash and bags).
If this market was in Stoke or Hull there would be a national outcry. Farage would be all over it like a rash.
https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/cou...
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-new...
Slightly amusing how a lot of stuff like this thats happening to uk is things they have done to others in the past
A lot of the problems we are dealing with now are definitely self inflicted.
> "empowers traders to build a sustainable future in premises that align with their long-term business goals"
After referencing my corporatese translation book, I believe this means "Traders can get fucked we have money to make."
This is why I'm distrustful towards any initiatives aiming to make a city "more liveable for humans".
First they entice you with a vision of a place where everything is within walking distance, then they do this.
What's more liveable and walking-distance than a market within walking distance from where you live? This has nothing to do with urbanism, this is purely capitalistic efficiency.
Please read my comment again.
I'm complaining about places to go within walking distance, such as this market, being removed despite declarations from the city authorities that they're making the place more liveable.
Smithfield features quite heavily in “Great Expectations”. Dickens hated the place. He subscribed to a theory that a city needed good circulation, which meant that things that obstructed traffic were considered bad, and Smithfield was hugely stationary and snarked up everything around it.
Of course, he had no concept of the circulation of money as being interesting and important to the “health” of a city, but most economists since Marx do.
We spent our first year as a startup hacking on laptops in the attic of Smithfields, along with a dozen other startups. No idea if Innovation Warehouse is still up there[1]. If you arrived at work early enough they'd still be hosing the blood off the tarmac from the early morning market.
Most startups moved out to WeWork as soon as they could turn a profit. But hey, it was cheap office space in super-central London.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/innovationwarehouselondon/
Still time to prevent this. Fingers crossed.
Another fascinating, vibrant part of a city's history destroyed and replaced with generic glossy bullshit.
Real estate developer looking to build build flats for Chinese and Russian investors. Gotta love the grift
Oh no, that'd be awful...but good news, I just looked into it, no China/Russia investors! It's a real estate developer working with the people to get a bunch of units built to ease a historic shortage. Huzzah!
There is no way in hell anything built there will be for normal people. That area is on the doorstep of the City, with excellent connections, it’s like the centre of a compass transport wise. When completed, you can bet it will be 2m+ for a shoebox sized apartment, with yearly fees that would swallow any normal persons salary.
There's a billion dollar price tag being punted around and you think the resulting development is going to be aimed at and priced to reduce a housing supply shortage? Are you by chance on the market to buy a bridge?
They're saying "thousands of new homes." If they can build that many homes for a billion dollars, that doesn't sound like its' all luxury housing.
I know I'm supposed to say no, but...yes I do believe it.
I have a proof, too long to be contained within the margins of this page, that when supply goes up, price goes down
Go for it. Econ 100 textbook bs about supply and demand are trivially dismissed by a casual examination of housing and rental prices in the US in gentrified areas. What happens when the real world intrudes on academic platitudes is rather straightforward: pricing for everything goes up and the folks who were struggling get pushed out. Nobody who couldn't afford housing in the market before the shift is served.
I'm more than open to reading anything about that! Literally anything!
Most respectfully and deferentially, I don't think "more things available makes price goes down" is a platitude or textbook or academic thing!
I must confess, the fact this Fat Tony logic and not some theory invented in an academic textbook ivory-tower divorced-from-reality impoverished-intellectual safe haven is why I cannot provide a proof: the note about the margin was an attempt to inject some levity, via a reference to Fermat!
Trump tower 2.0 London Edition?
Luxury apartments do reduce the housing shortage. Cashed up boomers can move out of the nice family home they've been living in since the kids left and upgrade/downsize.
Building the high end and having people move up helps with the high cost of construction also.
The general phenomenon is well known to those who study this kind of thing, but yep, building housing of any price helps reduce costs overall:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtering_(housing)
Depends on if people live in it or buy as an investment and leave it vacant or air bb as often happens in London
Not really since those people would otherwise some different existing property to do the same thing with.
Is there any Russian money going to UK/London anymore? Or any that wasn't frozen/sanctioned that hasn't already left.
I know of trader who left London to work in Dubai to still take his Russian clients business, and apparently all Russian money is going there instead of London.
No Russian money, no sirree. Fortunately there's still plenty of housing designed to appeal to Russian-speaking investors holding passports from Vanuatu, Cyprus or St Kitts and Nevis and fat investment trusts in the Cayman Islands.
Guess I better get cross out my "buy fresh meat from Smithfield at 6am" item from my bucket list soon...
An old tradition is to be replaced with the current hot trend: selling condos as investment assets. But land speculation and development predates everything in london.
> "It means there’s no fish market for London, which would mean the populace of London would have to resort to using local fishmongers"
I mean, or Tesco?
Which many people call “Tesco’s” for some reason. I had to read your comment twice to spot the issue.
Because the name is a contraction of T. E. Stockwell and Jack Cohen.
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