Edward Lloyd, born around 1648, opened a coffee house on Tower Street in London in 1686, near the docks, as the city rebuilt from the Great Fire of 1666. He aimed it squarely at sailors, merchants, ship captains, and ship owners, and turned it into a clearinghouse for shipping news. Lloyd never wrote an insurance policy or owned a ship. Instead, merchants passed slips describing a ship and cargo around his tables, and investors who accepted part of the risk wrote their names underneath, the physical origin of the word underwriting.

In December 1691 Lloyd moved to Lombard Street, installed a pulpit from which a crier rang a bell and read arrivals, departures, and prices, and hosted candle auctions of ships and cargo. In 1696 and 1697 he published Lloyd’s News. The coffee house was also tied to the slave trade: London Gazette ads named it as the drop-off point for captured runaway slaves. After Lloyd died on February 15, 1713, the lease passed in quick succession through his head waiter William Newton, daughter Handy, Samuel Sheppard, and finally Thomas Jemson, who founded Lloyd’s List in 1734.

• In a candle auction, bidding ended the instant a pin stuck in a burning candle dropped out.
• Eric Williams documented the link between Lloyd’s and the slave trade in Capitalism and Slavery.
• In 1774 the underwriters formed a committee and moved to the Royal Exchange on Cornhill as the Society of Lloyd’s.
• A blue plaque marks the Lombard Street site on the wall of a Sainsbury’s supermarket.
• Lloyds Bank was founded separately by Sampson Lloyd in Birmingham in 1765 and has no link to the coffee house.