About Bonds

Smithfield in Its Heyday

Author: photograph by Christopher Hirsheimer
In his novel Imperial Palace, set in and around a great London hotel in the late 1920s, Arnold Bennett describes the early morning visit of Gracie Savott—the young, beautiful, self-absorbed daughter of a distinguished guest—to Smithfield with the hotel's manager and its meat buyer. This, in part, is what Gracie saw (and heard):

Bond In Investing Savings ''The illimitable interior had four chief colours: bright blue of the painted constructional ironwork, all columns and arches; red-pink-ivories of meat; white of the salesmen's long coats; and yellow of electricity. Hundreds of bays, which might or might not be called shops, lined with thousands of great steel hooks from each of which hung a carcass, salesmen standing at the front of every bay, and far at the back of every bay a sort of shanty-office in which lurked, crouching and peering forth, clerks pen in hand, like devilish accountants of some glittering, chill inferno… One long avenue of bays stretched endless in front, and others on either hand, producing in the stranger a feeling of infinity. Many people in the avenues, loitering, chatting, chaffing, bickering! And at frequent intervals market-porters bearing carcasses on their leather-protected shoulders, or porters pushing trucks full of carcasses, sped with bent heads feverishly through the avenues, careless of whom they might throw down or maim or kill. An impression of intense, cheerful vitality, contrasting dramatically with the dark somnolence of the streets around! A dream, a vast magic, set in the midst of the prosaic reality of industrial sleep!…The hour was twenty minutes to five, and all was as customary as the pavements of Bond Street at twenty minutes to noon. And the badinage between acquaintances, between buyers and sellers, was more picturesque than that of Bond Street. Gracie caught fragments as she passed. 'You dirty old tea-leaf!' 'Go on, you son of an unmarried woman!'…Gracie was delighted…''

Built during the heyday of the Roaring Twenties, the Mayfair still reflects the grandeur of the era with glass etchings, brass fixtures, skylight and frenzied pillars.

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