4am at Smithfield Market
It would be too easy to slip into an analogy of the city as a body when studying sites such as Smithfield. The stomach of the city. 800 years as the meat centre of London, it still transforms into a thriving hub each night, butchering huge carcasses that arrive (the live cattle used to be driven down the Farringdon Road into the heart of the city for the slaughter), now in refrigerator lorries, and trimming them down to manageable parts to be sold "front of house" in the aisles running axially through the market. Buyers come direct from their restaurants around London, and further, after they close - purchase the meat and the whole area shuts down again just in time for the commuters to start arriving at 7am. The blood splattered men in hard hats and welly boots are only disturbed in their work by annoying photographers and trashed clubbers stumbling out of Fabric.
