Insurance giant began as coffee-house

Press, 28 January 1986, Page 14

Insurance giant began as coffee-house

Lloyd’s of London — one of the world’s most famous insurance companies — started as a coffee-house.

Edward Lloyd moved his coffee-house from London’s Tower Street to Lombard Street in 1692, where it became popular with people in the shipping business. Many of the Lloyd’s patrons were businessmen who insured goods brought to England from overseas. Lloyd’s eventually became the place to go if you wanted to do business insuring a ship’s cargo or wanted to hire a ship. From these beginings, Lloyd’s grew to be the world’s centre for marine information and

insurance. The first coffee-house in London was opened in 1652 — the first in Britain two years before, in Oxford. Within 40 years there were 500 of them.

In the days before telegraph or newspapers, cof-fee-houses were places where men exchanged news of the moment or conducted their business.

Nearly half the coffee drunk in the world today comes from Brazil — but the plant had its origins in Africa, where it used to grow wild. It was introduced into Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and cof-fee-houses flourished in

Europe and North America in the 1600 s. Now, time for tea. The Indian state of Assam is the home of the only wild tea plant to be found anywhere in the world. Apparently the crop went unnoticed or ignored and for at least 1000 years China was the only place where tea was cultivated.

Europeans did not discover the drink until the end of the sixteenth century and it was not until the mid-1600s that the first tea-house opened in London. In the 1830 s tea was found growing wild in Assam. From then on India led China in tea production.