Some weird and wonderful trades have dominated Smithfield over the centuries Mills for corn (but also for lead) in the 12th century. Tanning and leather-making in the 14th century. Horse slaughtering and clock making in the 18th century. Cat gut working and violin string making in the early 19th century. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was smoking bacon.
People in late Victorian England discovered bacon in the same way our 20th century forbears discovered the avocado. Once they had discovered it they couldn’t live without it. Bacon became all the rage. The meat traders who had been drawn to the new covered meat market at Smithfield, seized on this new business opportunity. Bacon stoves were thrown up all around the area where Cowcross Street and St John Street meet. It became the only business carried on in Peter Street and Greenhill’s Rents.
Stoves for smoking bacon varied in size, but some were huge – up to 60 feet high. The smoke chambers would have iron bars across them for hanging the hams or sides of pork which were being smoked. Smokeries would contain several stoves in a courtyard.
One of the new smoking entrepreneurs in the 1870s was a Mr Harris who moved into No. 6 Cowcross Street and gained world-wide fame (at least in the meat world) as ‘The Sausage King’. A decade later, the Sausage King’s throne was usurped by two brothers – John Boyd and Thomas Boyd – who put up stoves and warehouses in all the little courts around Peter’s Lane. They became known in the Press as the first ‘Bacon-And-Ham Millionaires’.
Competition continued. But in the end it was Danish bacon which came to dominate the bacon industry – as it has done ever since. The Danish Bacon Company set up its headquarters at Nos. 9 -13 Cowcross Street. By the 1930s, they had taken over nearly all the surrounding properties, eventually becoming the biggest bacon producer in the area, or indeed London, with 19 enormous stoves spread over a site nearly an acre in size. At its height, the business produced 30,000 sides of bacon a week. Danish Bacon Co eventually moved its headquarters to Welwyn Garden City just before the Second World War, but continued curing bacon in Cowcross Street until the 1980s. The last remaining commercial stove was not pulled down until the mid-1980s.
The Danish Bacon Co empire covered most of the land between Cowcross Street, St John Street and Britton Street. That whole area was bought up by developers in the 1980s; but nothing was done with it for many years. In 1993, Ransome’s Dock Limited appeared on the scene with a large scheme for redeveloping the area. Over the next decade the world of smokeries, stoves, warehouses, and narrow courtyards was replaced with large developments, such as City Pavilion, Exchange Place, and Zinc House, and also some spacious pedestrian precincts.
The stoves themselves may have gone, but some of the bacon business buildings survived. Nos. 9 to 13, the headquarters of the Danish Bacon Co (called Denmark House unsurprisingly), became a listed building in 1994 and so it avoided demolition. Ransome’s Dock Limited converted it into shops and offices.
Another bacon smoking company of the Victorian era, called JD Link & Son, continued curing bacon in Cowcross Street until the 1980s. It was not in quite the same league as the Danes but it got through 6,000 sides of bacon a week. Links’s factory was at Nos. 78 to 85 Cowcross Street and part of Greenhill’s Rents. This was turned into offices in 1987. The original buildings have not been completely replaced, but it would be hard to recognise any 19th century buildings behind the frontage you see today.
Most of the smokeries and their bacon stoves were totally swept away by redevelopment, but there is one building – St John Restaurant and Bar in St John Street – which has kept alive a memory of the bacon smoking history of the area. Before it was turned into a restaurant, it was essentially a yard which had been roofed over and used as a smokery. Six of the traditional smoking stoves still stood in the yard when the renowned restaurateur, Fergus Henderson, took the building over. Being an architect himself, with a strong feel for the history of his building, he found a way to incorporate the old bacon stoves into his new restaurant. Today, one of them provides the walls of the bar, and others have been incorporated almost invisibly into other parts of the premises – one is now a cupboard, for example.
The smokeries and the stoves have all gone, but ghost of Smithfield’s bacon curing past still lives on in St John Restaurant and Bar.