Royal Exchange, London

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Exchange in London has stood at the heart of the City for more than four centuries, and for much of that time it has been the place where the news of a new monarch reaches the public first. When a king or queen dies and the Accession Council confirms the succession, a herald climbs the steps of the Royal Exchange and reads the proclamation aloud to the crowd gathered below. That ceremony alone tells you something essential about what this building means: it is not simply a place for buying and selling. It is a stage on which the City performs its identity.

  Sir Thomas Gresham, the merchant who founded the Exchange on the 23rd of January 1571, had an idea that was radical for England at the time. Every major trading nation on the Continent already had a dedicated bourse - a building set aside purely for commerce. England had nothing of the kind. Gresham wanted to change that, and he looked to Antwerp, the city where he served as the English crown's representative, for a model.

  The building Gresham raised has since burned to the ground twice and been rebuilt from scratch. The current structure, opened by Queen Victoria on the 28th of October 1844, contains sculptures by a cast of some of the Victorian era's most celebrated artists, bells cast by the Mears foundry of Whitechapel, and murals stretching across its first-floor walls like a painted history of London itself. What brought this building into existence? How did it survive centuries of fire, war, and financial upheaval? And what does it say about London that this place - once home to Lloyd's insurance market and a young Paul Julius Reuter - now houses restaurants and luxury shops?

• 2. Gresham's Vision

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  Richard Clough first raised the idea of a dedicated exchange in 1562, a decade before the building actually opened. His inspiration was the bourse in Antwerp, the world's first purpose-built commercial exchange. Thomas Gresham knew that building intimately from his years in Antwerp as the representative of the English crown, and he saw no reason why London should remain the only major trading capital without one.

  Gresham's design followed the Antwerp model closely. It was a four-sided structure enclosing a central courtyard where merchants and traders could gather, deal, and argue. That courtyard layout would later prove so influential that the bourses of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, built in 1611 and after, drew on the same basic plan. Britain had nothing like it before. The Royal Exchange was the country's first specialist commercial building.

  Clough did not merely sketch the plans and step aside. He oversaw the importing of materials from Antwerp directly: stone, slate, wainscot, and glass. He paid thousands of pounds of his own money for those imports. The site itself came from two institutions that still jointly own the freehold today - the City of London Corporation and the Worshipful Company of Mercers.

  Queen Elizabeth I opened the finished building in January 1571, awarded it its royal title, and granted it a licence to sell alcohol and valuable goods. For the next several decades, though, only the exchange of physical goods took place on the floor. Stockbrokers were barred entirely - the official reason being their rude manners. Excluded from the Exchange, they set up their operations in the coffee houses nearby, most notably Jonathan's Coffee-House, which would eventually evolve into something rather larger than a place for a hot drink.

• 3. Fire, Ruin, and Rebuilding

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  Gresham's original building did not survive the century. The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed it completely. A second exchange, designed by Edward Jarman, opened on the same site in 1669. It featured a tall wooden tower over the south entrance in Corn Hill. That tower eventually fell into disrepair, and in 1821 it was replaced with a new stone tower and cupola designed by George Smith.

  The second building's end came suddenly on the 10th of January 1838. An overheated stove started the blaze, and the fire burned so fiercely that it was visible from Windsor, 24 miles away. Lloyd's insurance market, which had made the building its home for nearly a century and a half, was forced to relocate temporarily to South Sea House.

  One remarkable survivor of the 1838 fire was the golden Gresham Grasshopper, the Exchange's weathervane. The Grasshopper was Sir Thomas Gresham's own crest, and according to legend its origins reach back further still - to a story in which a grasshopper's chirping led to the discovery of a foundling who became the ancestor of the Gresham family. The rescued weathervane is 11 feet long and now stands 177 feet above street level on the clock tower of the present building.

  A competition to design the replacement was held in 1839-40. Sir William Tite won it, beating out C. R. Cockerell. Tite's design preserved the essence of Gresham's original concept: the four-sided structure around a central courtyard. What it added was the neoclassical grandeur that still defines the building today. The internal works, handled by Edward I'Anson, made notable use of concrete at a time when that material was far from standard in British construction.

• 4. Stone, Bronze, and Paint

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  The portico at the western end of the present building is defined by eight Corinthian columns rising to a pediment. Inside that pediment's tympanum, Richard Westmacott the younger carved seventeen figures representing London merchants and foreign traders, with a central allegorical figure of Commerce presiding over them. Above the main entrance runs a Latin inscription chosen by Albert, Prince Consort, from Psalm 24: "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof."

  In front of the portico stands a statue of Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington - the last work completed by Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey. The bronze used to cast it came from French cannons captured during the Napoleonic Wars, donated by the government. It was unveiled on the 18th of June 1844, chosen deliberately as the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. The King of Saxony was present for the ceremony.

  Inside the central courtyard, two statues stand in niches. One depicts Charles II - it is a copy made in 1792 by John Spiller, based on Grinling Gibbons' original statue that had stood in the 17th-century courtyard. That statue survived the 1838 fire. The other depicts Queen Elizabeth I, sculpted by Musgrave Watson in 1844, commissioned specifically because she was the monarch who had conferred the royal title on the Exchange.

  Between Wellington's statue and the Exchange steps stands the London Troops Memorial, commemorating the dead of military units linked to the City and County of London during the First World War. Sir Aston Webb designed it; Alfred Drury sculpted the two flanking bronze soldiers and the lion on top. It was unveiled on the 12th of November 1920 in the presence of the Duke of York, later King George VI.

  From 1892, twenty-four scenes from London's history were painted onto the first-floor walls by a roster of artists that included Sir Frederic Leighton, Sir Frank Brangwyn, and Stanhope Forbes. Leighton's panel, completed in 1895, depicts Phoenicians trading with the early Britons on the coast of Cornwall. Forbes painted two of the panels, including one of the Great Fire of London and one of the destruction of the second Exchange in 1838 - a painter returning to the scene of the catastrophe that made his subject possible.

• 5. The Bells Above

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  Up in the clock tower, fifteen bells cast by Charles and George Mears of Whitechapel in 1844 form a chime that can play God Save the King, The Roast Beef of Old England, Rule Britannia, and Psalm 104. The original plan called for only nine bells - the same number the tower had held before the fire. The increase to fifteen came at the suggestion of Edward John Dent, who visited Brussels specifically to study how Continental carillons were arranged. Dent came back convinced that a larger complement would allow a far greater range of tunes.

  A committee advisor, Professor Taylor, backed the expansion to fifteen, arguing that the number would permit playing across three full octaves. The largest bell also serves as the hour bell. Its inscription names the architect, the founders, and the presiding officers of the Gresham College Committee and the Mercers' Company at the time: Richard Lambert Jones, Daniel Watney, Ebenezer Trottman, William Tite, and Charles and George Mears. The remaining fourteen bells carry only the words "Royal Exchange, 1844."

  The clock in the tower is the work of Edward John Dent - the same man whose trip to Brussels nudged the bell count upward. A grasshopper weathervane almost identical to the one atop the Exchange stands today on Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts. That one was made by Shem Drowne in 1742 and was directly inspired by the London original, carrying Gresham's crest across the Atlantic more than a century after his death.

• 6. Commerce, Insurance, and Reuters

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  The Exchange's courtyard was always meant to be a meeting place for traders of many origins, and in the 17th century that cosmopolitan reality drew admiring attention. A passage from the period describes merchants of different faiths - Jews, Muslims, and Christians - transacting business together as though religion were irrelevant, reserving the label of "infidel" only for bankrupts. It was commerce, the writer observed, not creed, that organised the Exchange's floor.

  Lloyd's insurance market occupied the building for nearly 150 years across the first and second Exchange buildings, before the 1838 fire forced it out. Paul Julius Reuter established the Reuters news agency at 1, Royal Exchange Buildings - the address is just opposite and to the east of the Exchange itself - in 1851. A statue of Reuter now stands in a lane by the eastern entrance to the building. Nearby stands a second statue, of George Peabody, who founded the Peabody Trust and a business that eventually became J.P. Morgan and Co.

  In 1982, with the glass roof in danger of collapse, the newly formed London International Financial Futures Exchange took over the courtyard as its trading floor. The organisation managed this without altering the building's original framework. LIFFE moved to Cannon Bridge in 1991. A decade later, in 2001, the interiors and courtyard were remodelled again by architects Aukett Fitzroy Robinson, with the works including a two-floor office extension and a replacement roof over the courtyard.

  In 2013 a 104-year lease was sold by Anglo Irish Bank to Oxford Properties, a Canadian company that is a division of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, for a reported £86.5 million. In October 2022, Ardent UK acquired the retail element from Oxford Properties for around £50 million. The freehold, though, has never moved: the City of London Corporation and the Worshipful Company of Mercers still hold it jointly, as they have since Richard Clough first shipped his Antwerp stone and slate across the North Sea.