What do they sell?
| • Fish • Flowers • Poultry • Bedding plants |
• Herbs • Shellfish • Fruit and Veg |
SPRAWLING New Smithfield Market is the thumping heart of Manchester’s food and restaurant trade, where the raw ingredients for a thousand menus are bought and sold every day.
While most chefs are winding down after a night’s cooking, and office workers are soundly asleep in their beds, New Smithfield’s hardy traders are busy packaging orders for across the region, ready for opening time.
At 4am, the fish market is packed with Wellington booted, white-coated men lugging ice-filled boxes of wriggling crabs and woozy oysters, shouting orders and ticking off lists. Shark, fresh salmon and sea bass pack the shelves alongside more exotic imports like mullet and tuna.
Just across the road is the cavernous fruit and vegetable market. As big as an aircraft hanger, the rows and rows of traders shops are jam-packed with meaty onions, bunches of herbs, sacks of waxy potatoes, tomatoes – basically, anything that grows.
The air is fragrant with the smell of musty soil and full of the busy beeps of forklifts and the urgent banter of traders. Although trading starts later than in the fish market, fruit and vegetable traders don’t finish working until 9am, and start at around midnight.
Fresh and artificial flowers and plants are also available daily in the flower market, as are seasonal goods such as holly, Christmas trees and mistletoe. There is also a growers market where bedding plants and flowers can be bought direct from the nurseryman throughout the growing season.
Based in Openshaw, east Manchester, the market has a proud history. First established in the Smithfield area of what is now known as the Northern Quarter in 1872, the market moved to the new covered buyers’ walkways in 1972.
Any traders, shopkeeper or retailer can come to the market to purchase fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers at amazingly cheap prices, and the complex also houses small and medium warehouse units, shops, cafe units and a bank.
A large variety of continental, ethnic and oriental foods are also available.
Times and Dates
The market is held Monday to Saturday, 2.30am to 1pm, for fruit and vegetables, flowers, fish and poultry.
Do you want to sell in Manchester’s New Smithfield market?
Manchester City Council is always keen to hear from people who wish to trade at the New Smithfield market. For more information, click here
