Coffee houses, Exchange Alley and the 18th century
- London On The Ground
- 4 days ago
- 10 min read
A network of alleys in a tiny wedge of land in the City of London left a legacy in the economic and social history of London, the UK and the world.
On 25 March 1748 a fire broke out at Mr Eldridge’s, a periwig market, in Exchange Alley. The fire devastated a dense network of alleyways between Cornhill and Lombard Street in the City of London. In addition to residences, the fire consumed banks, booksellers, insurance offices, law firms, barbers, shops, taverns, alehouses and coffee houses. Among the most significant of these in historic importance were some of the coffee shops.
A map published in the London Magazine shows in detail all of the premises that were located in this small triangle of the City.
I am grateful to Professor Allison Muri of the University of Sakatchewan for permission to use the Exchange Alley map of 1748, taken from her website The Grub Street Project (a fabulous resource with several historic 18th century London maps and other documents).
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The main passage in the locale was Exchange Alley, now abbreviated to Change Alley. Its name reflects its proximity to the Royal Exchange, while also very nearby were the Bank of England, the General Post Office and, a few years later, Mansion House (home to the Lord Mayor).
This area was the City's major economic, commercial and communications hub, a role that was turbo-charged by the network of alleys whose coffee shops fostered the development of insurance markets, the market in stocks and shares and trading with colonies in the British empire and elsewhere.
The first coffee house in London was established in 1652 (see below) and there were around 500–600 in London and Westminster by 1708.
Unlike ale houses and taverns, the clientele stayed sober in coffee houses, which soon became places where people would meet and exchange ideas. They often attracted specialist clientele and provided a location where people could pursue their business interests.
Indeed, before purpose-built offices, merchants, traders and other businessmen listed coffee houses as their business address, where their correspondence was delivered.
The coffee houses also sold tea and chocolate, each for a penny, as well as tobacco. They were male-dominated establishments, where the only women present were staff or proprietors.
The passages and coffee shops around Exchange Alley were soon rebuilt after the 1748 fire, quickly resuming their crucial part in London’s development as a financial powerhouse.
The 18th century was the heyday of the London coffee houses, but those in the area between Cornhill and Lombard Street continued to be economically important into the first half of the 19th century.
This post looks at five coffee houses in or near to Exchange Alley that contributed significantly to the City’s economic development in the 18th century and whose legacy endures today.
Jamaica Coffee House: Caribbean trade
Today the Jamaica Wine House, affectionately known to City regulars as the Jampot, is a popular after-work pub and wine bar in St Michael’s Alley, off the south side of Cornhill.
The Jampot stands on the site of the first coffee shop in London. More of a market stall than a house, this was established in 1652 by Pasqua Rosée, the servant of a Levant Company merchant called Daniel Edwards.
Rosée was not a freeman of the City of London, which meant he could not trade in his own right. To get around this Christopher “Kit” Bowman, the former apprentice of Edwards’ father-in-law (an alderman), joined him as a partner.
In 1658 they moved into more substantial premises in St Michael’s Alley. It seems that Bowman took over the business solely from 1658 until he died in 1662.
On 10 December 1660 the great London diarist Samuel Pepys mentioned going to the “Coffee House in Cornhill” for the first time, where he “found much pleasure in it, through the diversity of company and discourse”.
The first reference to the Jamaica Coffee House on this site is in 1680, but it may have been operating here as early as 1674.
The first mention of a connection with Jamaica, according to The Grub Street Project, is in the Daily Journal on 15 January 1734: “The Freighters of the ship Lignenea… are desir'd to meet at the Jamaica Coffee House… in order to adjust what damages may be received.”
Nevertheless, it is likely that it had links to Jamaica at least as early as 1690. A notice in a newspaper of 1750 says that the Jamaica Coffee House had for 60 years been the place where letters for Jamaica should be left.
In the second half of the 18th century it was listed as a business address by merchants, brokers, ship and insurance brokers, coal-merchants, callico printers, rope line and net makers, rum and brandy merchants and others.
In 1798, the Universal British Directory described the clientele in the Jamaica: “West India merchants in general; policy and ship-insurance brokers, owners & commanders of ships trading to the West Indies & Leeward Islands and also brokers and dealers in the produce of those places.”
In the 18th century the main import into the UK from Jamaica was sugar, while tobacco, rum, coffee, hardwoods, cotton and spices were also imported. The production of these commodities relied on labour provided by enslaved African people.
As a major centre for traders buying and selling cargo from the Caribbean, including human beings, the Jamaica Coffee House was closely associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Jamaica retained its focus on trade with the West Indies until the middle of the 19th century, after the abolition of slavery, when it was becoming more a business exchange than a coffee house.
Today’s pub on the site, the Jamaica Wine House, was established in 1869.
Jonathan’s: stocks and shares dealers
Jonathan’s Coffee House, founded in c.1680 by Jonathan Miles, became the favoured location for stockjobbers dealing in stocks and shares. For a while they had traded in the nearby Royal Exchange, but were expelled by the more genteel merchants in the late 1690s for their loutish behaviour.
A broker named John Castaing, a French Huguenot, began posting the prices of stocks and commodities on the walls of Jonathan’s. In 1697 Castaing started a twice weekly newspaper, Course of the Exchange. It listed currency exchange rates and the prices of shares, bonds, annuities and bills of exchange in various European cities that were traded on the Royal Exchange. These prices were widely used in the coffee houses.
Trading in stocks and shares was unregulated. Seals were sealed with a handshake. Jonathan's was frequently used as a venue to offer shares in new companies, including many bogus schemes that raised money fraudulently.
Jonathan's played a role in the notorious South Sea Bubble, which ruined thousands of investors when the price of the South Sea Company’s shares collapsed in 1720.
The speculative nature of much investing activity sometimes made the coffee house more like a gambling den than a financial exchange. This led to the formation by 150 brokers of a club to limit admissions to Jonathan’s.
Further firmalising their operations, in 1773 stockbrokers and jobbers moved to their own new building not far away in Sweeting’s Alley (or Swithin’s Alley), which ran along the eastern edge of the Royal Exchange. Initially known as New Jonathan’s, it later became the London Stock Exchange.
It moved to another new building in nearby Capel Court in 1802 and to Stock Exchange Tower on Old Broad Street in 1972. In 2004 the London Stock Exchange moved to its present location in Paternoster Square, close to St Paul’s Cathedral, moving away from the vicinity of the Royal Exchange after more than three centuries.
Today, Jonathan’s is commemorated with a blue plaque on what is now the entrance to a private members’ club.
Garraway’s: commodities auctions
The first proprietor of Garraway’s was Thomas Garway (alternative spelling of Garraway), a tobacconist and coffee seller, who is also said to be the first person in England to sell tea.
The exact date of the founding of Garraway’s is unclear, but Thomas was living with his family in nearby Sweeting’s Rents, where he may have had a coffee house too, in 1657-58. He may have moved the establishment to Exchange Alley before the Great Fire, but it was certainly there by the early 1670s.
Garraway’s Coffee House was best known as a venue for commodities auctions. The Hudson Bay Company held its first sale of furs there in 1671.
Other items auctioned at Garraway’s included wine, tobacco, rum, diamonds, sugar, coffee, indigo, timber, textiles, spices, rice, wool and even ships and properties of all sizes across England and overseas.
These sales typically took place ‘by the candle’, meaning that the auction’s duration was limited to the time taken to burn down an inch of a candle.
Garraway’s was also frequented by stock brokers (although Jonathan’s was always their prime location) and also had a role in the South Sea Bubble.
The venue was a frequent location for public meetings and gatherings of a variety of organisation.
It was also sometimes a venue for more personal assignations.
The Public Advertiser of 1 January 1761 carried a notice asking “ a tall young gentleman ... observed and much approved of by a certain young lady at the last ridotto [a dance]” to “apply to A.B. at Garraway's Coffee-house”, where “he may be directed to have an interview with the young lady, which may prove greatly to his advantage”, but only “if his heart is entirely disengaged”.
Charles Dickens mentioned Garraway’s in The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewhit, Christmas Stories, Little Dorrit and The Uncommercial Traveller.
Garraway’s closed as a Coffee House in 1866, but continued to hold auctions for a few years after then. It was demolished to make way for offices for a bank.
By the early 20th century it formed part of the premises of Martins Bank, whose front entrance was on Lombard Street under the sign of the grasshopper. In 1930 Martins installed a stone relief marking the site of Garraway’s at the rear of their building.
Jerusalem Coffee House: metals trading
The Jerusalem’s origins are murky, but it seems likely that it was operating by the early 1700s. In the 1748 map of the area after the fire, it is shown at the end of Fleece Passage (later renamed Cowper’s Court), with a rear entrance into Exchange Alley.
Auctions of properties and sales of annuities took place in the Jerusalem Coffee House in the 18th century, when it was also listed as the business address of merchants, stock brokers, company directors and other traders.
In 1776 it was described as “the general resort of all those who had anything to do with India”. From 1796 it was known both as the Jerusalem and East India Coffee House and simply as the Jerusalem Coffee House.
After the Royal Exchange was destroyed by fire in 1838, a number of underwriters from Lloyd’s moved to the Jerusalem for a while.
By the early 1890s, the Jerusalem was officially a shipping and mercantile exchange, catering to traders with the Far East, India and the Americas. It also took in those interested in the Caribbean, who had previously met in the Jamaica Coffee House.
At some point in the 19th century metal merchants left the Royal Exchange, which had become overcrowded, and began trading in the Jerusalem. Trading sessions were initiated when a merchant with metal to sell drew a circle in the sawdust on the floor. At his cry of “Change”, anyone wishing to trade would gather around the circle to make their bids and offers.
This eventually led to the formation of the London Metal Exchange in 1877, established over a hat shop in nearby Lombard Court. In 1882 it moved to new purpose-built premises in Whittington Avenue, near Leadenhall Market.
Today, located in Finsbury Square, the LME trades around 90% of global non-ferrous metals. It still conducts trading by open outcry in a ring (formed by red sofas, rather than sawdust), a tradition that started in the Jerusalem.
Lloyd’s: insurance
Lloyd’s of London, a leading insurance institution, started in a coffee house. The first one was opened in Tower Street in 1688 by Edward Lloyd, who moved it a few years later to a location opposite one of the entrances to Exchange Alley on Lombard Street.
Lloyd’s Coffee House was the favoured haunt of ship’s captains, ship owners and others with an interest in the maritime industry. It spawned the marine insurance business, becoming a major stimulus to Britain’s development as a trading nation and as a colonial power and facilitating the growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Lloyd’s - which is not an insurance company, but an insurance market - now covers a very wide range of sectors and has a reputation for taking on specialist risks that other insurers are reluctant to cover.
For more on Lloyd’s, including a look inside its iconic 1986 offices designed by Richard Rogers, please read Lloyd’s of London: inside and outside the inside-out building.
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade
One way or another, all of the coffee shops in and around Exchange Alley were involved in global trade, shipping and commerce in the 18th century. As a result all were implicated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the slave trade.
Simultaneosly, this small triangle of land between Cornhill and Lombard Street also played a part in the abolition of the trade in enslaved human beings in 1807 and the abolition of slave ownership in 1834.
2 George Yard was the location of the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade on 22 May 1787.
Not a coffee house this time, the meeting took place at a Quaker bookshop and print shop, which also published the first abolitionist literature.
Although many of the buildings in this area now are from the 20th and 21st centuries, the network of alleys retains its historic plan.
It is remarkable that such a tiny wedge of land could have such a profound and lasting impact of the history of London, the UK and the world.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
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