Leadenhall Market & Lloyd's: The Fire That Invented Insurance
Why is it significant?
Walk under the glass and iron roof of Leadenhall Market: cobbles underfoot, cream and maroon paintwork, gilded details and lanterns hanging over the lanes. It feels like a stage set, and that is because, in a way, it is one.
Key Facts
| Place | Leadenhall Market & Lloyd's: The Fire That Invented Insurance |
|---|---|
| Address | Leadenhall Market, Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 1LT, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51270, -0.08340 |
| Part of Walk | London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk under the glass and iron roof of Leadenhall Market: cobbles underfoot, cream and maroon paintwork, gilded details and lanterns hanging over the lanes. It feels like a stage set, and that is because, in a way, it is one.
There has been a market here since the Middle Ages, selling poultry, meat and cheese, but this building is Victorian, designed in 1881 by Horace Jones, the same architect who built Tower Bridge. And under your feet lies something far older: the remains of the Roman basilica and forum, the largest Roman building ever found north of the Alps. Fans of the first Harry Potter film will know the lanes too. They were used for Diagon Alley.
Now walk to the eastern end and look up at the building covered in steel pipes, ducts and glass lifts crawling up the outside. That is the Lloyd's building, designed by Richard Rogers and finished in 1986, and it is the heart of a market that the Great Fire helped to create. After 1666, Londoners realised that a whole city could vanish in four days. Within a few years a builder and speculator called Nicholas Barbon set up one of the first fire insurance offices in the world.
Insurance companies soon fixed metal badges, fire marks, to the walls of the houses they insured, and ran their own teams of firemen. It is often said that those firemen would turn up at a burning house, look for their company's badge, and walk away if it belonged to a rival. Historians think that is exaggerated... but the badges are real, and you can still spot old ones on London walls.
Lloyd's itself began around 1688 in Edward Lloyd's coffee house near the river, where merchants and ship captains met. Men who agreed to share the risk of a voyage signed their names underneath the details, and that is where the word underwriter comes from. Leave the market by its western end and walk along Cornhill to the great temple front at Bank junction.