Billingsgate handled oysters by the hundred million. Then the beds collapsed and the food of the poor became a luxury.
The Oyster Shed sits on the river with three thousand and seventy-eight reviews and a 4.2, and it is named after the buildings where the oysters were landed.
The scale
It is genuinely difficult to comprehend.
Nineteenth-century London ate oysters in quantities that are, by modern standards, absurd – hundreds of millions of them a year, landed at Billingsgate, dredged from the Thames estuary, from Kent, from Essex, from Whitstable.
They were sold from barrows on the street. They were the cheapest protein available. Dickens has Sam Weller observe that poverty and oysters always seem to go together, and it is a joke about how common they were.
The oyster shells found in London archaeological digs are so ubiquitous that they are barely worth recording.
What happened
Everything at once.
Overfishing, first and most obviously – a wild population dredged at that rate for a century cannot replace itself.
Then pollution. The Thames in the nineteenth century was, by the 1850s, effectively dead – the Great Stink of 1858 was so bad that Parliament, sitting beside it, curtained the windows in lime chloride and considered relocating.
Then disease, and a series of catastrophic winters, and then a typhoid outbreak in the 1900s linked to sewage-contaminated oysters, which destroyed public confidence overnight.
And within a generation the native oyster had gone from the diet of the poor entirely.
The inversion
And this is the finding, and we made it at the Cow in Notting Hill and at the Walrus and the Carpenter, and it holds.
Scarcity did the rest. The food of the poor became the food of the rich, purely because there was no longer enough of it – and the price rose, and the class of person eating them changed completely, and it took about fifty years.
Nobody eating a three-pound oyster today has any idea that their great-great-grandfather regarded it as a sign of hard times.
The same thing happened to lobster, which was fed to prisoners and servants. And to salmon, and to nearly every part of the pig.
And they are coming back
Slowly, and it is worth reporting.
The Thames is enormously cleaner than it was – it was declared biologically dead in 1957 and it now supports well over a hundred species of fish – and there are active native oyster restoration projects in the estuary.
An oyster filters something like a hundred and fifty litres of water a day. A large enough population is not merely a food source. It is a water treatment system that reproduces itself.
We removed it, and then spent a fortune on sewers, and are now trying to put it back.
Verdict
Good pub, superb terrace, and a river that we killed and are slowly un-killing.
Billingsgate
Which is now an office block, and which gave the English language a word.
Billingsgate was the fish market, and the fishwives who worked it were famous – genuinely, nationally famous – for the quality and volume of their abuse.
To talk Billingsgate meant to swear fluently and inventively, and it was in the dictionary, and it was used as a term of art.
The market moved to the Isle of Dogs in 1982. The building is still there, by the river, and it is beautiful, and it is completely silent.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This is what happens when someone documents how institutions actually function instead of how they pretend to function in their rulebooks.