This site is a chronological history of one building: the Royal Exchange, on Cornhill in the City of London. It traces the site from Sir Thomas Gresham's private venture in 1571 through two fires, three buildings, and more than four centuries of continuous use at the same Bank junction address. Five chapters cover the founding, the two fires and rebuildings, the Grade I listed building completed in 1844, the glazing of its courtyard in the 1880s, and the restaurants that have occupied that courtyard since 2001.
What This Site Covers
Each chapter follows a single period in the building's history, from Gresham's Antwerp-modelled trading hall through Edward Jerman's Baroque rebuild, Sir William Tite's 1844 design, and the glass roof added roughly forty years later. A closing chapter looks at how the courtyard has been used for dining, from the Grand Café and Sauterelle that traded there between 2001 and 2019, to the tenants operating in the same space today. Architectural detail, sources and dates are drawn from public records, published histories and the building's own listing description, and each chapter links to the ones either side of it, so the story can be read start to finish or dipped into by period.
The chapters are arranged in the order the building itself went through them, not by which topic might draw the most attention. A visitor who only wants to know why the courtyard has a glass roof can go straight to that chapter; a reader working through the whole four centuries can follow the "next chapter" link at the foot of each page and reach the end in five short sittings. Dates, names and figures, such as the 13,200 houses lost in 1666, Sir William Tite's five rival architects in 1839, and the year Lloyd's moved into the building, are the same ones repeated in the facts strip at the foot of each chapter, so a reader skimming for a single figure doesn't have to reread a whole page to find it.
Sources and Images
Photographs on this site are drawn from Wikimedia Commons and credited individually where they appear: a modern exterior shot of the portico, a 19th-century engraving of the second Exchange, and a portrait of Gresham held by the National Portrait Gallery among them. Two illustrations depicting the Grand Café and Sauterelle are labelled as illustrations rather than photographs, since no rights-clear photograph of either restaurant's interior survives online; every other image on the site is a real photograph or historic artwork of the actual building, not a generated stand-in for it.
Where a date or detail is genuinely disputed (the exact year Lloyd's moved into the building is recorded as both 1773 and 1774 in different sources, for instance), the more commonly cited figure is used, and the chapter says so rather than presenting a single date as beyond question.
The Five Chapters
- Founding, 1566 to 1571: Sir Thomas Gresham built the first Royal Exchange at his own expense, modelled on the Antwerp Bourse, and Elizabeth I opened it in person.
- Fire and Rebuilding, 1666 and 1838: burned once in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt by 1669, then destroyed again in 1838 and rebuilt a second time.
- The Third Exchange, 1844: Sir William Tite's design, chosen by competition after the 1838 fire, is the Grade I listed building still standing on Cornhill today.
- The Glazed Courtyard, 1880s: how the building's open-air trading courtyard came to be roofed over in glass, decades after Tite's building opened.
- Dining Then and Now, 2001 to today: the restaurants that have traded in that glazed courtyard since it reopened for dining at the turn of this century.
The building has changed hands, tenants and even shape twice over since 1571, but its plan on Cornhill and its Grade I listing have stayed constant since 1844. That continuity is what the five chapters on this site set out to document: one site, rebuilt twice, in use for trade or dining without a real gap since the sixteenth century.