Cattle and the City
A walk through Rome's old slaughterhouse and a daydream about Hereford's old cattle market
Most of the early childhood holidays that I can remember were in Wales. When we started to venture further afield — France, Italy, Greece, Spain — my family developed a predictable ritual. My brother Lloyd and I would wait until Mum observed that the place we were visiting resembled somewhere we knew already, almost always somewhere in Wales. In a Spanish coastal town, she might say, “doesn’t it look like Penarth marina?” On a sandy beach in Greece, she might say “it’s a bit like Barafundle bay, except not quite as nice.”
Like clockwork, Lloyd and I would immediately protest that the place we were visiting was nothing like its Welsh analogue, quickly reeling off a list of differences between the two. We had come all this way in order to be somewhere entirely unlike Wales, our reasoning went. Why bother waking up at 3am, driving to an airport, suffering the indignity of flying, to visit somewhere that was just like home?
What we had not understood is that comparisons help us to orient ourselves in a new place. In a way, we were doing the same thing that Mum was doing, albeit in reverse. She was looking for similarities, and we were looking for differences. Together, we were all describing this new place in the only way we knew how: with reference to other places we had already seen. Learning about a new place is no different from learning a new word or a new idea. As the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure put it: “what characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.”
In April I spent a long lunchtime in Rome, on my way to visit my friend D and his family in Abruzzo. I planned my route so that I could cross the river from Trastevere station, on the east side of the Tiber. I would then walk through the mattatoio, the old slaughterhouse, on my way to lunch in Testaccio market.
The 19th century slaughterhouse was once Europe’s largest, and one of its most technologically advanced, but it has not been used for meat processing since the 1970s. It was refurbished at the start of this century, and some of the space is now used by the University of Roma Tre, and for art exhibitions and other such events. I had not walked through the complex for quite a while, but I always spot something new when I do.
I do not have a great deal of personal experience with abattoirs; by rights, this place should feel profoundly foreign to me. Instead, on my walk between the buildings of the old slaughterhouse, I remembered a shortcut I used to take through Hereford’s Cattle Market, another place haunted by the ghosts of livestock. The old slaughterhouse did not feel quite like home, but it nonetheless felt somehow familiar.
I had no deep connections to cattle farming. I never went to the auction, although I spent plenty of Wednesday mornings sat in traffic behind those who did. Nonetheless, I felt an attachment to the old Cattle Market that cannot be rationally explained.
As a sixth-former in Hereford, the plan to turn the Cattle Market into a shopping centre spurred me to skip college early and join a protest outside the Shirehall. We were an eclectic coalition of farmers, market traders, and students who fancied ourselves anarchists. We did not manage to picket the meeting of Hereford Council that was voting on the shopping centre plans, but we did make a bit of noise outside.
In spite of our best efforts, the last cow was sold by auction on the old Cattle Market site in 2011. The shopping centre opened in 2014. Eight years on, I still call it the “new development,” although its official name is the “Old Market.” Little remains of the Cattle Market itself, except in the form of parody: postmodern architectural ‘nods’ to the rooves of the old auction houses, and a Hereford bull on the shopping centre’s sign.
It almost feels as though the shopping centre developers have claimed victory over the old marketplace, in the same way that early Christians deliberately built churches out of ancient Roman temples. They incorporated the spoils of the former temple into the new church, as a reminder of what once stood there, as if to say: “what once stood here is no more; we have surpassed it, we have made it redundant.”
As a teenager I insisted that my opposition to the “new development” was anti-capitalist, although in retrospect that does not quite make sense. The old Cattle Market is a capitalist institution as well. It is a market, after all; the clue is in the name. Perhaps my opposition was more complicated than that. Looking back, I wonder whether I resented the encroachment of a particular kind of capitalism — homogeneous, urban, consumer-driven — on top of the (capitalist) agricultural ecosystem which was already there.
I did not feel that I particularly needed any of the things the ‘modernisers’ of Hereford city centre offered. Worcester, less than half an hour by train, had a multi-screen cinema, a Nando’s, and even a Topman. I was more than happy to make pilgrimage there to buy black skinny jeans: the uniform of boys in the late noughties who really, really liked folk music. Why become a second-rate shopping destination when you have always been a first-rate agricultural centre?
Agriculture is still serious business in Herefordshire. The New Cattle Market is a short drive from the old one. Nonetheless, food production’s most visible symbol has now been pushed some way outside the city centre. The realities of the livestock trade could no longer coexist with the clean glass storefronts of the twenty-first century shopping centre.
The Cattle Market was too muddy, too boisterous, and perhaps too close a reminder of death. The Act of Parliament that allowed Hereford Council to relocate the Cattle Market was passed in 2003, following the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. The city centre had to be ‘cleaned’ of the very thing that put Hereford on the map.
When I was walking through Rome’s old slaughterhouse, it struck me that it made perfect sense to compare Testaccio and Hereford. The meat industry made Testaccio. A great deal of the neighbourhood’s housing was built for slaughterhouse workers. In turn, Testaccio to some extent made what we think of today as Roman cuisine: thrifty and offal-driven.
The difference is that the layers of history in Rome are on display, jostling with one another for attention. The fragments of ancient pottery on which Testaccio is built are difficult to avoid. The renovated old slaughterhouse makes no attempt to hide the system of hooks on which carcasses were transported through the market (hygienically, with minimal human contact). The idea of Testaccio as a meat district lives on in its trattorie, which still serve some of the best offal in the city.
Hereford’s ‘new development’ is already struggling. Debenham’s, the department store that took up a sizeable part of the shopping centre, has closed its doors. Placing a whole city’s bets on retail and office space might not have been such a good idea. Rome has its fair share of problems, too; gentrification has made property in Testaccio unaffordable for a number of locals. But it still carries a reminder that food production has not always been invisible in the modern city.
Ancient Rome was messy in all senses of the word. Archaeological digs have shown that, in amongst the markets and temples, there were a fair number of vineyards too. In other words, the urban : agricultural dichotomy is a false one. What if the very idea of a commercial ‘High Street’ was flawed even before it was threatened by online shopping? What would our cities look like if, rather than being ashamed of food production, and relegating it to the invisible suburbs, we decided to blend the agricultural and the urban? What if the pavements of our city centres were covered in mud?