World’s Most Famous Insurance Market Continues to Underwrite Risks That Other Insurers Decline, Including a Celebrity Body Part Portfolio That Would Surprise the Original Coffee Shop Members
Welcome to Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — the satirical financial history dispatch from the coffee shop that became the world’s most important insurance market without fully intending to.
Lloyd’s of London began in Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop on Tower Street in 1688, where merchants, ship owners, and the financiers willing to back their voyages gathered to exchange news, negotiate cargo rates, and informally underwrite maritime risk. Edward Lloyd had no insurance business. He ran a coffee shop. The insurance market formed organically around his premises because it had good information flow — the news of ship arrivals, departures, and losses that came into a well-placed Thames-adjacent coffee shop — and the people who needed to arrange insurance were already there. By 1774 the underwriters had moved to the Royal Exchange. By 1986 they were in their current Richard Rogers-designed building in Lime Street, with its exposed ductwork and lifts on the outside and the Lutine Bell (salvaged from HMS Lutine, lost in 1799 with gold bullion; the bell is rung once for bad news and twice for good) at its centre. The coffee shop is a Starbucks now.
What Lloyd’s Actually Insures: The Famous and the Frankly Unexpected
Lloyd’s of London has underwritten: ships (original purpose, ongoing), cargo (original purpose, ongoing), David Beckham’s legs (reportedly PS70 million, before a knee injury made this somewhat relevant), Tina Turner’s legs (reportedly PS3.2 million), America Ferrera’s smile (reportedly PS10 million for a toothpaste campaign), Keith Richards’ hands (the figure varies by telling; the principle is consistent), the 1970 FIFA World Cup trophy (insured before it was stolen from a shop window display and lost forever), and various weather-related risks including the insurance of outdoor events against rainfall. “We insure the risks that nobody else will insure,” confirmed a Lloyd’s market spokesperson, which is the organisation’s mission statement distilled. “Sometimes that includes celebrity appendages.” Lloyd’s of London’s official site covers the market’s current operation without the celebrity appendage examples, which are covered in every other article about Lloyd’s.
The Lloyd’s Building: Richard Rogers’ Inside-Out Architecture and Why It Still Looks Revolutionary Forty Years Later
The Lloyd’s Building at 1 Lime Street, designed by Richard Rogers and completed in 1986, was radical enough at opening to be controversial and has become historic enough to be Grade I listed, making it the youngest building in England to receive the highest designation of architectural protection. Rogers placed the building’s service infrastructure — lifts, staircases, toilets, ductwork — on the exterior, freeing the interior floors for flexible underwriting use and producing a building that from the outside looks like a machine component of enormous sophistication and from the inside functions as a working insurance market. “The architecture,” noted Rogers, “followed the function.” The Lloyd’s underwriters, who had been working in various buildings since 1688, adapted to the new one and continued insuring things. The building is viewable from the street at no charge. The celebrity body part policies are not publicly disclosed. For satirical financial history journalism, visit The London Prat.
More satire: NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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London is the only city where the phrase “mind the gap” applies to both the train and the growing chasm between your expectations and reality.
Stunning quest there. What occurred after? Thanks!