Primal Cuts was a site-responsive digital audio walk commissioned by Culture Mile in January 2020. The piece accompanies a short walk from Smithfield Market to the London Stock Exchange, tracing a path from the historical roots of the City of London as a market district, to its position today at the centre of global financial trade.
The City is one of the oldest municipal democracies in the world, and the City of London Corporation has held the rights to administer its affairs independently of the Crown since the Middle Ages. It has functioned for centuries like a state within a state, and today these ancient privileges render the City a special economic zone; an offshore island in the middle of London. In ‘financialese’, the City of London is a ‘hub’ into which tens of millions of Euros, Dollars, Roubles and Yen flow every second through fibre-optic cables, in a marketplace that is at once global and intensely localised. However, long before it became the financial capital of Europe, the City was the centre of a nationwide livestock trade; for centuries the twice-weekly market at Smithfield connected buyers and sellers across great distances through an elaborate infrastructure of people, routes, and regulations. Traders developed innovative financial technologies including credit systems, insurance, and primitive futures contracts, as well as market manipulation strategies like engrossing and forestalling. In some respects, commerce at Smithfield prefigured the development of a modern capitalist system in Renaissance Europe, establishing a now-familiar economic trajectory towards increased liquidity and market growth. In Primal Cuts, the parallels and contrasts between markets old and new are explored through sound recordings, music and text.