One of my earliest childhood memories is so bizarre that I have, until very recently, doubted its veracity.  The memory is of visiting a cattle market in London with my father in the early 1960s.  Think about that for a moment.  A live cattle market.  In London.  In the 1960s.  How can that be possible?  Yet the memory is a very vivid one and some of its details are very precise.  For example, I remember walking there from our home in Camden.

My father’s ancestors were farmers and he was always sentimental both about his rural childhood and about animals generally, so it would have been perfectly in character for him to take me to such a market.  He certainly took me to the pet market in Club Row, Shoreditch (which closed in the 1980s) on several occasions to look at dogs, cats, rabbits, and so on.  But a livestock market?

After relatively little digging (thank you to Google and my mother!), it seems my memories are more trustworthy than I thought, or at least they’re not completely untrustworthy.  The place we visited wasn’t a market in the strictest meaning of the word, but it was the collection of slaughterhouses around Caledonian Road to which large numbers of animals were driven until the mid 1960s. Congestion in the local area (a long but manageable walk from our home for a young boy) meant that the animals (sheep, not cattle) were routinely herded along the local streets to meet their demise at the hands of north London’s butchers.  Don McCullin’s beautiful and eerie picture of Caledonian Road in 1965 (below) captures something of the place I remember.

I’m pleased to have witnessed first-hand something now long passed, days when the countryside intruded into the busy city.  I’m even more pleased that what I was beginning to think was a fantasy actually happened.  But it begs another question.  What was my father thinking, taking his young son to a collection of abattoirs?  I doubt Google can help me with that one …