Smithfield meat market’s Christmas Eve auction is back for 2024

Good news for meat lovers and lovers of a meaty bargain: Smithfield Meat Market’s raucously enjoyable Christmas Eve sale will be back once again this year.

For some, it’s become a tradition to attend, as much for the fun of the event as the chance to go home with some exceptionally good cuts of meat at prices at insanely low prices. What was once a necessity in the days before refrigeration, to sell meat as close to consumption and ensure none is left to rot over the Christmas holiday — is now a tradition maintained by one Smithfield butcher.

Greg Lawrence has worked at Smithfield since he was sixteen and is now Managing Director of G Lawrence Wholesale Meats, and in the run-up to Christmas, his firm gathers plenty of choice meats and turkeys from the other traders ready for the crowd that’ll turn up on a cold Christmas morning.

The auction will take place on Tuesday 24th December 2024 at 10am in the covered Grand Avenue that runs through the market — a couple of minutes walk from Farringdon station.

You don’t need to be there quite as early as some, who will be grabbing front row spots from 9:30am, for while being at the front of the crowd undeniably helps, they go to a lot of effort to spot people who haven’t made a purchase and try to ensure as many people as possible go home with something.

Once it starts at 10am, for an hour or so, the butchers come out parading choice chunks of meat, declaring a shockingly low price, then a roar as people wave money over their heads and try to grab a bargain.

You need to bring cash — it’s cash only.

Being at the back and catching their eye means handing cash forward over people’s heads (the crowd always helps), and then a flying pig hurtles back at you as that pork loin or leg you bought is sent your way. Or the turkey, or the beef, or whatever it is they manage to rustle up.

Don’t expect delicate little slices of something in a neat supermarket package, for this is a proper butcher selling butcher cuts, so you’ll be getting the real thing in very large portions. But that’s the joy of it – to buy for a fraction of what you’d pay in a supermarket – a hunk of meat that leaves you going home thinking, “How on earth can we eat all that!”

Bring some bags, a handful of tenners and twenties, and enjoy the puzzled look on the way back home on the tube with a rack of ribs bulging out of a bag or a suckling pig draped over your shoulder, all of a quality better than a supermarket at a fraction of the price.

Whether you’re going with the hope of filling the freezer or just to snag a single item as a treat, it’s as much a tradition for the bargains as the sheer damn fun of it all. I’ve never seen a person leave who wasn’t smiling.