Lloyd’s traces its roots to a London cafe – what were these London cafes? | Property Insurance Law Team Blog

Last week’s post, Lloyd’s Insurance Marketplace, pointed out that Lloyd’s is not an insurance company. The post noted that Lloyd’s traces its roots to a coffee house in London owned by Edward Lloyd.

Wikipedia refers to an introduction to Lloyd’s Coffee House as follows:

Lloyd’s Coffee House was a significant meeting place in London in the 17th and 18th centuries.

It was opened by Edward Lloyd … 1686. The establishment was a popular place for sailors, merchants and shipowners, and Lloyd provided for them by providing reliable shipping news. The shipping industry visited the site to discuss marine insurance, ship brokers and foreign trade. The transactions that took place led to the establishment of the insurance market Lloyd̵

7;s of London, Lloyd’s Register and several related freight and insurance companies.

The café moved to Lombard Street in December 1691. Lloyd had a pulpit installed in the new premises, from which sea auction prices and shipping news were announced. Light auctions were held at the facility, with lots often involving ships and shipping. From 1696 to 1697, Lloyd also experimented with publishing a newspaper, Lloyd’s News, which reported on shipping schedules and insurance contracts made at the coffee shop. In 1713, the year of Edward Lloyd’s death, he changed his will to transfer the lease of the coffee house to his supercooler, William Newton, who then married one of Lloyd’s daughters, Handy. Newton died the following year and Handy subsequently married Samuel Sheppard. She died in 1720 and Sheppard died in 1727, leaving the coffee house to her sister Elizabeth and her husband, Thomas Jemson. Jemson founded the magazine Lloyd’s List in 1734, similar to the previous Lloyd’s News. Merchants continued to discuss insurance matters there until 1774, when the participating members of the insurance arrangement formed a committee and moved to the Royal Exchange at Cornhill as the Society of Lloyd’s. (quotes omitted)

Cafes today are not like London Coffee Houses in the 17th and 18th centuries. Unlike today, customers did not visit the facilities just to get the nice taste of coffee:

The London coffee boom began in 1652 when Pasqua Rosée, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant trader, opened London’s first café (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael’s Cemetery in a maze of alleys outside Cornhill. Coffee was a resounding success; within a couple of years, Pasqua sold over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local taverns. For anyone who has ever tried 17th-century coffee, this can come as something of a shock – if you do not like your brew “black as hell, strong as dead, sweet as love”, as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and pushed through with Gravel.

… An early sampler likened it to a “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes” while others were reminded of oil, ink, soot, clay, moisture and shit. Nevertheless, people loved how the “bitter Muhammadan gruel”, described by The London Spy in 1701, sparked conversations, sparked debates, sparked ideas and, as Pasqua himself pointed out in his handbook The Virtue of the Coffee Drink (1652), made a “fit for business” – his stable was a stone’s throw from the large warehouse for international trade, the Royal Exchange.¹

In cafes today, most customers are completely separated from others. Many for internet discussions with people in remote locations. This is completely different from the benefit and operation of London Coffee Houses:

[E]arly coffeehouses all followed the same drawing, maximizing customer interaction and creating a creative, convivial environment. They emerged as smoky forums with candlelight for commercial transactions, lively debate and exchange of information, ideas and lies. This small drawing in body color shows an anonymous (and so, it is safe to assume, quite typical) cafe from around 1700.

… Customers sat around long common tables strewn with all kinds of media that could conceivably listen to each other’s conversations, sharpen when they wanted to and reflect on the newspapers. Talking to strangers, a foreign concept in most cafes today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and a shameless social climber, kept a diary from 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffee shop, sitting next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private drawers and stalls began to appear from the end of the 1740s, but before that it was almost impossible to have a genuinely private conversation in a café …

Today, such social sharing can be found virtually. This blog is an example. But long before the Internet, the coffee house played an important role in shaping the political and commercial society:

[T]The coffee house’s formula with maximized sociability, critical judgment and relative sobriety proved to be a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Cafes encouraged political debate, paving the way for the expansion of voters in the 19th century. The city cafes created capitalist innovations that shaped the modern world.

For those interested in the topic of coffee houses, I suggest you watch an exciting TED video by Dr. Matthew Green:

Today’s thoughts

The ability to handle people is as much a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for anyone else under the sun.
—John D. Rockefeller
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¹ The Lost World of the London Coffeehouseavailable at https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-lost-world-of-the-london-coffeehouse