And if fish is caught commercially, it needs to be sold. For centuries, this was done by the fishwife hawking the daily catch — usually her husband’s or father’s — around the streets of the city and further afield. Or by the box in auction to restaurants, fishmongers and fish and chip shops.

Before 1896, there was no building in which to sell fish. Instead, there was an open air pier-head market, seemingly disorganised but serving its purpose. The hubbub and crowded busy-ness of it all would have been a spectacle. Horse and carts, and pony and traps waited patiently by as their owners were in amongst the crowd buying the fish by the boxful. And all the time the last remaining fishing boats would be straggling into the harbour to offload their catch.

For centuries, this happened at the pierhead in all weathers. At one time, it was not just the Newhaven fishermen that were landing their catch but many of the other fishing communities which lined the coast of the Forth too. Because Edinburgh was a major transport hub, the daily catch would then travel to other parts of the country. For an hour or so in the early morning all would have been bedlam before calm would descend over the village as some order was brought out of the chaos and fish salesmen could set out the catch.

With the coming of the railways and steamboats, these fishing villages found they had improved direct access to other more profitable markets and trade at Newhaven started to dwindle. An enclosed Newhaven Fishmarket was conceived by Henry Dempster, known as the Ancient Mariner and a native of the village. He proposed that this would revive the area’s fortunes. A wholesale system was created and fish was sent here daily by rail. Newhaven prospered once more.

The main building was constructed in 1896 on reclaimed land immediately adjacent to Newhaven Pier on the eastern side and was surrounded by a setted roadway. It has a cast iron frame with red sandstone twin gabled ends and 26 timber boarded arches along its east and west sides that gave access to its interior. Immediately outside the main building at set intervals were three large stone washtubs for the purposes of washing and scrubbing the fish boxes clean. The floor level of the Fishmarket building was elevated to enable fish boxes to be loaded more easily onto carts and lorries waiting for the auction’s end and the fish could be loaded onto their transport and taken away.

The Victorians would invest time and money to adorn even a vernacular building like a fish market. Such it was in Newhaven where a series of fanlights windows above some of the shutters featured stained glass adornment. Now all of the originals are gone but Welch the Fishmongers has replicas of some of the panels above their entrances as a homage to the original sales hall.

Buyers came from all around and would start to arrive from 6am — fishmongers both wholesale and retail, chip shop owners, fishwives (not just from Newhaven but from Fisherrow, Musselburgh as well as other coastal communities). By 11am, it was all over: the auctions concluded by around 9 o’clock, the market efficiently emptied and the area hosed down ready for the next day’s sales.

Over time, commercial fishing has changed radically. Now boats are much larger, leaving mainly from Peterhead in the north-east of Scotland and Lerwick. Although the B-listed building still houses a small fish market much of the space has been converted to restaurants.

Gordon Young, Newhaven Heritage