The Birmingham Wholesale Markets are the largest combined wholesale food markets in the United Kingdom with 235 trading units. Which is located south of the Bull Ring in the centre of Birmingham, they include markets selling meat, fish, poultry, fruit, vegetables and flowers and are run by Birmingham City Council.
Birmingham’s wholesale food markets date from 1166, when the Lord of the Manor Peter de Birmingham obtained a royal charter permitting him to hold a market at “his castle at Birmingham”, though later members of the de Birmingham family claimed that markets in Birmingham had been held since before the Norman Conquest. It was this market that provided the first drive to the growth of Birmingham as a commercial town from the twelfth century onwards. Until the nineteenth century the markets were held throughout the streets of the centre of the town.
In 1769 the market was one of the main concerns of f the Birmingham Street Commissioners
And from 1806 then saw the collection of tolls which lead to buying the marketing s outright i from the Lord of the Manor in 1824 from 1854 Birmingham corporation then held the responsibility of the marketing outright
From the early nineteenth century the clearance of buildings from the Bull Ring allowed the concentration of the markets on the site, and in 1817 the Street Commissioners opened the Smithfield market on the site of the Birmingham Manor House, where new wholesale fruit and vegetable markets opened on Moat Row
From 1883, and the pig and cattle trades moved to a new market in Montague Street and between 1892 and 1898. The wholesale fish market in Bell Street was opened in 1869 and extended in 1883, while in 1897 a new meat market with an attached slaughterhouse was opened in Bradford Street.
Due to increasing congestion in the markets area, and with the demolition of the Fish Market for the construction of the new Bull Ring Centre in 1958 and the increasing inadequacy of the Smithfield and City Meat markets, it was decided to develop a new wholesale market complex. The first phase of the current market buildings opened in February 1974. Phase 1 of the scheme, was seeing the opening of the New Fish, Meat and Poultry Markets to the trade.