In the 1680s Jonathan Miles opened a coffee house in Exchange Alley in the City of London. For a penny, anyone could get a dish of coffee, newspapers, and conversation at shared benches, and by 1696 Jonathan’s was implicated in a plot to assassinate King William III amid the paranoia that followed the Popish Plot. In 1698 the stock jobbers, traders who bought and sold on their own account and were despised by the silk and spice merchants, were expelled from the Royal Exchange for their noise. They moved to Jonathan’s and nearby Garraway’s, where broker John Castaing began posting prices as The Course of the Exchange and Other Things.

Jonathan’s became the center of the South Sea Bubble, when shares rose from around 100 pounds to over 1,000 before collapsing in 1720. Playwright Susanna Centlivre and Daniel Defoe both mocked the jobbers. In 1748 the building burned down. In 1761 a club of 150 brokers and jobbers formed to trade stocks with their own rules, and in 1773 they moved to a building in Sweetings Alley called New Jonathan’s, soon renamed the Stock Exchange, the ancestor of the London Stock Exchange.

• The South Sea Company took on government debt in exchange for a trade monopoly with South America.
• Centlivre set a scene in Jonathan’s where jobbers are drowned out by waiters calling out coffee and Bohea tea.
• Defoe’s 1719 pamphlet traced a jobber’s loop from Jonathan’s to Garraway’s to the Sword Blade Bank and back.
• The Sword Blade Bank was closely tied to the South Sea Company.
• Before the 1748 fire, Jonathan’s also operated as a lottery office.