I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  People either love it or hate it, but the design has many advantages, allowing a clear open space for the trading floors inside, with plenty of daylight flooding in through the glass atrium roof, and repair work on the services able to take place without disturbing the work going on inside.

  Banks of escalators move people between the four open floors of the ‘Room’, where the underwriters do their business beneath the soaring rectangular 12-storey atrium. Offices occupy the floors above on either side. The wooden ‘boxes’ of the syndicates in the Room employ the same design as in previous Lloyd’s buildings, and in the middle, underneath the atrium, sits the rostrum from the old building containing the famous LUTINE BELL.

  Displayed in a glass cabinet near the rostrum is the jewel of the company’s prized Nelson Collection, the original logbook of the frigate HMS Euralyus, an observer at the Battle of Trafalgar, opened at the page recording Nelson’s message to his fleet, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’.

  * * *

  The Lutine Bell

  The bell was salvaged in 1859 from a captured French frigate La Lutine (the Sprite) which sank off the Dutch coast in 1799 carrying a cargo of gold and silver bullion insured at Lloyd’s for £1 million. It was hung in the Lloyd’s underwriting room, then at the Royal Exchange, and was rung when news of overdue ships came in, so that everyone involved in the risk was made aware at the same time. Bad news was announced by one stroke of the bell, good news by two strokes. The Lutine Bell is no longer rung for this purpose, but is sounded on ceremonial occasions or for exceptional disasters such as the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001.

  * * *

  An exhilarating ride in one of the outside elevators, the first of their kind in Britain, takes you up to the 11th floor, where the Lloyd’s building hides its biggest surprise, the glorious blue and cream Adam Room, an early work of Robert Adam, designed in 1763 for Bowood House in Wiltshire. When a large part of Bowood House was demolished in 1956, Lloyd’s purchased the Adam Room and reassembled it in their previous premises, from where it was transferred to the present building and restored to its original proportions. Used for meetings of the Council of Lloyd’s and for receptions, the magnificent classical design provides a wondrous contrast to the stark modernism of rest of the building.

  Lloyd’s of London is the world’s leading insurance market. It all began in 1688 in a coffee-house in Tower Street, run by Edward Lloyd and frequented by sailors, merchants and shipowners who would exchange information about their ships and cargoes and arrange insurance. Individuals would each take a share of the risk for payment of a premium and write their names on the policy, one under the other. Hence they were known as ‘underwriters’.

  A few years later, around 1696, Edward Lloyd began to publish a news sheet containing all the shipping information he had gathered. Called Lloyd’s News, this was the forerunner of Lloyd’s List and LONDON’S FIRST DAILY NEWSPAPER.

  As business grew it eventually became necessary to find new premises, and over the year Lloyd’s has operated out of many different City addresses, from the Royal Exchange and Leadenhall Street to its present ultra-modern home at No. 1 Lime Street. As one wag put it, Lloyd’s has gone from a coffee shop to a coffee machine.

  Cornhill

  Highest Point

  CORNHILL IS THE highest point of the City and was the site of the huge basilica, one of the largest in the whole Roman empire, of Londinium. In medieval times it was a grain market and then the location of a pillory where the author Daniel Defoe, who had a hosier’s shop nearby, was placed in 1703 for writing a pamphlet satirising the government.

  ST PETER UPON CORNHILL was founded in AD 179 by LUCIUS, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN KING OF BRITAIN, and is THE OLDEST CHRISTIAN SITE IN LONDON. It remained the Christian centre of England until Augustine arrived in Canterbury in 597. Burned down in the Great Fire, St Peter’s was rebuilt by Christopher Wren in 1781 and featured a Father Smith organ played by Mendelssohn in 1840. In the song ‘Oranges and Lemons’ the church appears in the line ‘Pancakes and fritters say the bells of St Peter’s’. The front of the church on Cornhill is rather unprepossessing, but St Peter’s Alley leads down the side to a small churchyard at the back, from where the view is rather more appealing. The church is now a Christian Aid centre.

  Standing slightly back from the street, the elaborate carved doorway to ST MICHAEL, by Sir George Gilbert Scott, comes as a pleasing surprise. So does the beautiful 130 ft (40 m) high pale stone tower started by Christopher Wren and completed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, based on the tower of Magdalen College in Oxford. The poet THOMAS GRAY, author of the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, was baptised at St Michael’s in 1716. He was born at what was No. 41 Cornhill, where his mother ran a milliner’s shop. It was burned down in 1748 and the site is now occupied by No. 39.

  The door of No. 32 has a number of panels with reliefs showing local historical events. This was once No. 65 Cornhill, and the offices of the publishers Smith and Elder. In 1848 two of their authors arrived for a surprise visit and caused a certain amount of consternation, for the publishers had been under the impression that they had been dealing with a couple of gentleman authors called Acton and Currer Bell. In fact they turned out to be Anne and Charlotte Brontë. In 1859 the CORNHILL MAGAZINE was first published at No. 65, with Charlotte Brontë’s literary hero WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY as its first editor. The magazine continued until 1975.

  St Michael, Cornhill

  On the corner of Lombard Street and Cornhill was the shop of bookseller and stationer THOMAS GUY (1644–1724), the founder of Guy’s Hospital. He made much of his fortune by selling out of South Sea Stock before it collapsed in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

  Coffee-Houses

  The First Information Superhighway

  BETWEEN CORNHILL AND Lombard Street there is a maze of narrow passageways and alleys created so that messengers could flit to and fro between all the different businesses that were based around here. And they were also home in the 17th and 18th centuries to dozens of coffee-houses and taverns where merchants, bankers and traders would meet to exchange news and ideas. This area was the original ‘information superhighway’. Many of London’s and the world’s great institutions originated in the coffee-houses of these alleyways: institutions such as Lloyd’s of London, the Baltic Exchange and the Stock Exchange. Today the alleys are dark, featureless and rather disappointing but various plaques high up on the white tile walls tell something of the momentous events and ideas that went out from here to challenge and change the world.

  THE FIRST COFFEE-HOUSE IN LONDON was PASQUA ROSEE’S, opened in 1652 by Christopher Bowman and his Levantine partner Pasqua Rosee in St Michael’s Alley at the east end of Cornhill. It was burned down in the Great Fire and replaced by the Jamaica Coffee-House, now the Jamaica Wine House.

  In Castle Court is the GEORGE AND VULTURE, several times rebuilt on the site of a tavern first recorded here in the 12th century. Jonathan Swift drank here, as did Charles Dickens, who mentions the pub in Pickwick Papers. In the 18th century the George and Vulture was a favourite haunt of the notorious Hellfire Club, led by Sir Francis Dashwood.

  In COWPER’S COURT the JERUSALEM COFFEE-HOUSE for a while rivalled Lloyd’s as a meeting place for those in the business of shipping. Employees from the East India Company, whose headquarters were nearby in Leadenhall Street, met here so often that it became known as the Jerusalem and East India coffee-house. The writer Charles Lamb (1775–1834), the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and the novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) all worked at the East India Company. When the Company ceased trading in 1873, Lloyd’s took over their headquarters, which was situated where the new Lloyd’s building now stands.

  CHANGE ALLEY, which took its original name, Exchange Alley, from its position close to the Royal Exchange, was home to GARRAWAY’S coffee-house, opened in 1669 by THOMAS GARRAWAY, THE FIRST MAN TO IMPORT TEA INTO BRITAIN.


  A few years later JONATHAN’S COFFEE-HOUSE opened up in Change Alley and became a favourite meeting-place for the stock dealers who had been expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdiness. THE FIRST RECORDED ORGANISED TRADING IN MARKETABLE STOCKS took place at Jonathan’s in 1698, and this was the origin of the London Stock Exchange. Both Garraways’s and Jonathan’s were at the centre of the frantic activity of THE FIRST MAJOR STOCK MARKET CRASH, the SOUTH SEA BUBBLE of 1720.

  Also in Change Alley, its site now marked with a blue plaque, was the KING’S ARMS TAVERN, where THE FIRST MEETING OF THE MARINE SOCIETY WAS HELD on 25 June 1756.

  Further west, in POPE’S HEAD ALLEY, stood the Pope’s Head tavern, where the first edition of JOHN SPEED’S 1611 ATLAS OF BRITAIN was sold by JOHN SUDBURY and GEORGE HUMBLE, THE FIRST LONDON PRINT-SELLERS. In 1627 George Humble went on to sell Speed’s The Prospect of the World, THE FIRST WORLD ATLAS BY AN ENGLISHMAN.

  St Mary Woolnoth

  Amazing Grace

  BAROQUE ST MARY Woolnoth fills the angle between Lombard Street and King William Street and sits on the site of the Roman temple to Concord. The name Woolnoth comes from the church’s Saxon founder, a noble called Wulfnoth. St Mary was damaged by the Great Fire and half-heartedly restored by Christopher Wren, but what we see today is the work of Nicolas Hawksmoor – his only City church, completed in 1727.

  The interior, based on the Egyptian Hall of Vitruvius, is considered to be Hawksmoor’s finest. This is one of the busiest corners in Britain, a heartbeat from the financial centre of the world, with Bank underground station occupying the crypt, and yet as you enter the church the roar and hot breath of commerce fade and a sense of space and calm descends – somehow Hawksmoor has achieved a Tardis effect, with the inside of the church appearing to be much more spacious than it looks from outside.

  On the wall there is a plaque to the reformed slave trader JOHN NEWTON that speaks for itself.

  JOHN NEWTON

  ONCE AN INFIDEL AND

  LIBERTINE

  A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN

  AFRICA

  WAS

  BY THE RICH MERCY

  OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR

  JESUS CHRIST

  PRESERVED, RESTORED,

  PARDONED

  AND APPOINTED TO PREACH

  THE FAITH

  HE HAD LONG LABOURED

  TO DESTROY

  John Newton was Rector here for 28 years and wrote the hymns ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘Amazing Grace’. He died in 1807, the year his dream was realised, with the introduction of the Slave Trade Act that abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. William Wilberforce declared his inspiration to be the sermons John Newton gave from the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth.

  Edward Lloyd, whose coffee-house in Lombard Street was the origin of Lloyd’s of London insurance market, was buried here in 1713.

  In the west gallery is a 17th-century Father Smith organ, THE ONLY UNRESTORED EXAMPLE OF ITS KIND LEFT IN LONDON.

  St Mary Woolnoth was THE ONLY CITY CHURCH TO SURVIVE THE BLITZ UNSCATHED.

  Royal Exchange

  A Place to Meet

  THE ORIGINAL EXCHANGE was built by Elizabethan merchant Sir Thomas Gresham in 1535, and opened as the Royal Exchange by Elizabeth I in 1571. It was intended as a true market-place, modelled on the Bourse in Antwerp, with a trading floor, offices and shops set around an open courtyard where traders could meet and do business. It was THE FIRST SPECIALIST COMMERCIAL BUILDING IN BRITAIN. The complex was destroyed by fire in 1666 and again in 1838. The present building, with its noble Corinthian portico of eight pillars, was designed by Sir William Tite and opened by Queen Victoria in 1844. The inner courtyard was roofed over, and in 1892 scenes from London’s history were painted on the walls of the Ambulatory by leading artists of the day such as Sir Frederick Leighton and Sir Frank Brangwyn. You can see them by climbing up to the first-floor gallery.

  After being occupied by the Guardian Royal Exchange and the London International Financial Futures Exchange, the Royal Exchange has been redeveloped as a luxury shopping centre and has returned to its original role as a place for City workers to meet and discuss business over coffee.

  In Royal Exchange Buildings at the back of the Exchange there is a statue of a seated GEORGE PEABODY (1795–1869), a grocer from Massachusetts who spent his fortune building houses for the poor of London. Peabody Buildings can still be found all across the capital.

  PAUL JULIUS REUTER set up his news agency at No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings in 1851. The agency later moved to Fleet Street and is now at Blackwall (see Tower Hamlets).

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  EC3 NORTH

  The SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE in Bevis Marks, built in 1701, is THE OLDEST SYNAGOGUE IN BRITAIN. The sumptuous galleried interior has since inspired the design of many of Britain’s subsequent synagogues. In the synagogue’s register of births there is an entry from 1804 in the name of BENJAMIN D’ISRAELI. After an argument with the synagogue’s elders D’Israeli’s father took his son to be baptised at St Andrew’s Church in Holborn, a gesture that would later allow Disraeli, as he became, to become a Member of Parliament and eventually BRITAIN’S FIRST JEWISH-BORN PRIME MINISTER.

  LOMBARD STREET is named after the Lombardy merchants who came here in the 12th and 13th centuries to collect taxes for the Pope, then became bankers in place of the Jews ousted by Edward I in 1290. Barclays, Lloyds, Glyn Mills and Martin’s banks have all had their head offices in Lombard Street, which is still regarded as the banking centre of Britain. Edward Lloyd moved his coffee-house here from Tower Street in 1692. The poet ALEXANDER POPE was born in Plough Court, off Lombard Street, in 1688.

  30 ST MARY AXE, designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2004, is the London headquarters of THE WORLD’S LARGEST REINSURANCE COMPANY, Swiss Re, and is LONDON’S FIRST ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE TALL BUILDING. Known affectionately as THE ‘GHERKIN’, it is the sixth tallest building in London and forms a futuristic and almost surreal backdrop to many of the City’s more traditional scenes.

  LEADENHALL MARKET stands on the site of 1st-century Londinium’s basilica, which covered an area bigger than Trafalgar Square and was the biggest basilica north of the Alps. It takes its name from a lead-roofed house that belonged to the Neville family who lived here in the 14th century. It is shaped like a cross and has narrow, cobbled streets and passageways lined with shops, all enclosed in glorious Victorian wrought ironwork and glass. In 2001 Bull’s Head Passage in Leadenhall Market was transformed into Diagon Alley, where Harry goes shopping for his magic wand in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

  EC2

  BANK – BISHOPSGATE – BARBICAN – GUILDHALL – CHEAPSIDE

  Bank of England – the world’s first privately owned national bank

  Bank

  Spend a Penny

  TO STAND ON that small triangle of land in front of the Royal Exchange is to feel right at the heart of things. Even though many of the financial institutions have spread themselves out around London, the City is the ancestral home of the greatest concentration of wealth and power in the world, and grouped around this spot are some of the icons of that power and wealth: the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, the Mansion House.

  In front of the Royal Exchange steps is a bronze equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington by Sir Francis Chantrey. It was cast from guns the Iron Duke had captured from the French. Wellington is THE ONLY PERSON TO HAVE TWO EQUESTRIAN BRONZE STATUES RAISED TO HIM IN LONDON – the other one is at Hyde Park Corner.

  Nearby is the London Troops Memorial by Sir Aston Webb, which commemorates the men who died in the First World War.

  At the top of Cornhill, where it tends to go unnoticed, is a statue of South African-born engineer JAMES HENRY GREATHEAD (1844–96), inventor of the GREATHEAD TUNNELLING SHIELD. This was used to build the Tower Subway under the Thames in 1869 (see Tower Hamlets) and later for THE WORLD’S FIRST
ELECTRIC RAILWAY, the CITY AND SOUTH LONDON RAILWAY, which became the Northern Line.

  Underneath the pavement here is THE WORLD’S FIRST MUNICIPAL PUBLIC LAVATORY, which was also THE WORLD’S FIRST UNDERGROUND PUBLIC LAVATORY, opened in 1855. The charge was 1d, which became the standard fee and the origin of the expression to ‘spend a penny’.

  Bank of England

  Old Lady of Threadneedle Street

  THE BANK OF England was THE WORLD’S FIRST PRIVATELY OWNED NATIONAL BANK. It was founded in 1694 to provide King William III with money to finance his war against France, and was based on an idea by two city merchants, WILLIAM PATERSON and MICHAEL GODFREY. They proposed a scheme to create a national bank that would lend its share capital to the Government. In 1694 the Tunnage Act was passed which levied duties on shipping and alcohol and guaranteed an interest rate of 8 per cent to subscribers of the loan. The first Governor of the Bank was SIR JOHN HOUBLON, grandson of a Huguenot refugee.

  The Bank’s first home was the Mercer’s Hall in Cheapside, which stands on the place where Thomas à Becket was born.

  In 1734 the Bank moved to its present location on Threadneedle Street, where George Sampson had erected the Bank’s first purpose-built premises on the site of Sir John Houblon’s private house. Over the next 100 years the bank was gradually extended until it covered the present 5 acres (2 ha). The huge curtain wall was constructed by Sir John Soane from 1788, and the buildings now enclosed within are the work of Sir Herbert Baker from 1925 to 1939. The whole complex resides on an island site for added security and is huge – the Bank of England’s building has more space below ground than is contained in Tower 42, the former NatWest Tower on Bishopsgate.