Cowcross Street & the Cattle Ramps

Cowcross Street in London derived its name from a stone cross marking the Smithfield Cow Market, documented in John Stow's 1598 Survey of London. By the mid-nineteenth century, over 220,000 cattle and 1.5 million sheep were driven through the area annually. The surrounding alleys contained slaughterhouses and animal byproduct trades until the 1855 Smithfield Market Removal Act relocated live livestock to Islington.

London Β· from the walk β€œClerkenwell Uncovered: From the World's First Tube to London's Radical Heart” Β· audio ~3 min Β· Generated

Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BS

How did Cowcross Street in London get its name?

Take a deep breath. Look at the cobblestones beneath your feet. This is Cowcross Street... and its name holds a secret that most people get wrong. You might assume it was named for cows crossing the road. But no. There was once a large stone cross standing right where Saint John Street meets this road, a marker for the separate Smith field Cow Market. It was the cow market Cross that gave this street its name. The writer John Stow noted it in his Survey of London, published all the way back in fifteen ninety-eight.......... Now close your eyes for a moment and imagine this street in the eighteen thirties. The smell would have hit you first. By the middle of the nineteenth century, two hundred and twenty thousand head of cattle and one and a half Million sheep were being violently forced through these narrow streets every single year. Charles Dickens walked right through here and described the ground as covered ankle-deep in filth and mire, with thick steam rising from the reeking bodies of cattle.......... But here's a story most people never hear. A man named John Atcheler, born seventeen ninety-two, operated a slaughterhouse right here in Sharp's Alley, just off Cowcross Street, and Claimed to be "Horse Slaughterer to Her Majesty Queen Victoria." Was it true? To this day, it is disputed whether Atcheler had any official royal title at all. Before becoming London's most famous knacker, he had been a prize fighter, once winning a ninety-seven minute bout for ten Guineas near Walworth. By his death in eighteen sixty-seven, he was worth around thirty-five thousand pounds... the equivalent of nearly Four million today. His grave at Highgate Cemetery is topped with a statue of a Suffolk Punch horse with a drooping head. A Grade Two listed monument... to a knacker.......... And the trades that surrounded him here were extraordinary. Beside Atcheler laboured carcase-butchers, a bladder-dealer, and several catgut workers making strings for violins. Those guts weren't just for music! Gut bands powered machinery in an age before rubber, they ran clocks, and without the gut makers of Smithfield... there would have been no tennis rackets.......... Everything changed in eighteen fifty-five. The Smithfield Market Removal Act relocated the live cattle market to Copenhagen Fields in Islington, and in eighteen sixty, an Act of Parliament authorized the new buildings you see nearby. The most revolutionary part? The new market was built directly Over the world's first underground railway line. Metropolitan Line freight trains delivered meat into a huge basement of brick arches, and it was brought up to ground level via hydraulic lift... or the spiral ramp outside.......... Those iron cattle ramps near here... they are the last physical whisper of a trade that shaped this entire neighborhood for over Eight hundred years. Stand still, listen... and beneath the hum of modern London, you might just hear the echo of hooves on cobblestone.

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