Italian bankers set up on this street in the thirteenth century, and their emblem is still hanging over every pawnshop in Britain
1 Lombard Street holds a 4.6 from two thousand four hundred and fifty-eight people, charges forty to eighty pounds, and sits in a former banking hall with a glass dome.
And the street is named after the men who invented modern banking in this country, and their sign is still hanging over every pawnshop in Britain.
Why they came
Because the Church banned it.
Usury – lending money at interest – was prohibited to Christians under canon law. And a society cannot function without credit, and everybody knew it, and the prohibition was enormously inconvenient to everybody including the Church.
So the business fell to people who were outside the rules – to Jews, who were permitted to lend to Christians and who were then expelled from England by Edward I in 1290; and to the Lombards, who were merchants and bankers from northern Italy, and who found their way around the prohibition with an elegance that has been admired ever since.
They did not charge interest. Certainly not. They simply charged for the risk, and for the currency exchange, and for the delay, and the money came out at the same place.
The three balls
Here is the thing you have seen ten thousand times and never once asked about.
Every pawnbroker in Britain hangs three golden balls outside the door. It is one of the oldest and most universally recognised trade signs in Europe.
And it is Lombard. It is generally taken to derive from the arms of the Lombard bankers – and specifically, in the popular account, from the Medici – and it came to England with them and has never left.
The Prat has now spent four hundred and two articles establishing that England’s signage is a record of who used to be here. The mitre is a bishop’s land. The Cross Keys is the Pope. The white horse is Hanover.
And the three balls are a family of Italian moneylenders who arrived seven hundred and fifty years ago and are still, silently, advertising.
Popping the weasel, again
Which closes a loop from another postcode.
We wrote at the Eagle in Notting Hill that Pop Goes the Weasel is a song about pawning your coat to pay for drink, and that the pawnbroker was the working-class banking system – the good suit in on Monday, redeemed on Friday when the wages came, worn on Sunday, and in again on Monday.
Millions of people did this every week for generations.
And the sign they walked towards, on every street corner in industrial Britain, was the emblem of a medieval Italian banking family, hanging over a shop in Salford, and nobody knew.
The restaurant
Serious money, serious cooking, and a magnificent circular room under a glass dome – another banking hall, and we made the argument at the Crosse Keys about what these rooms were for and why they are all now selling food.
Verdict
Excellent. Expensive. Go, sit under the dome, and look up Lombard Street at the hanging signs – the grasshopper, the cat, the anchor – which are the last of the old shop signs in London, and which were a legal requirement until they started falling on people.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Laugh rather. Misery.