Billingsgate Market

What on earth would possess someone to get up at 4:45am on a Saturday morning? The answer is cheap, fresh fish – particularly tempting if you live in land-locked London. Sleepy-eyed and with a new partner in crime (the boy slept through the whole episode), I caught a bus to Billingsgate Market armed with garbage bags and plastic bags.

Billingsgate Market has been around since Roman times, but not in its current form. In 1699, an Act of Parliament turned it from a general market into a fish market. In 1850 it moved indoors, then was rebuilt in 1873. Outgrowing this too, Billingsgate was finally moved in 1982 to its current home 10 minutes from me in east London. Proclaiming itself ‘the largest inland UK fish market’, it has a mixture of products (of which a large percentage is flown in): chilled seafood (from as far as New Zealand they say!), imported frozen fish, farmed varieties and fish products – no freshly cooked seafood for breakfast though. It’s not quite Sydney Fish Market, but it’s pretty good all the same.

Now Billingsgate is not one for the polite or the overly hygiene-concious. You’ll need to loudly demand and point to the fish you want or you’ll never get served and if you’re lucky like me, your change will be dropped in the boxes of fish… twice. Some stalls provide plastic bags, but it’s safer to bring your own.

It doesn’t take long to wander down the 4 or 5 aisles, jumping out of the way as trolleys are pushed past you. And to my untrained eyes, the price and quality seemed fairly similar between stalls. This being my second expedition, I was determined to bring home at least some salmon and prawns (no frozen tilapia this time!). We came away with 3kg of prawns (which go up in price according to size), 5 x pomfret, a whole salmon (filleting it was another story), 6 x trout (at a bargain price) and 6 x delicious red snapper… thankfully, I had a good friend to help peel / clean / cook them!

Happy with our purchases, we then spent the next couple of hours shelling prawns and packaging fish into meal-sized portions for the freezer. (Note to self: buy salmon fillets next time – not sure the effort of scaling and filleting paid off, as the fillets we bought last time tasted better!) All up, it was £60 for a few months’ worth of fish and even though we were sleepy the rest of the day, it was worth it!