The Royal Exchange standing before you was quite literally the place where modern commerce came to life. In 1571, Queen Elizabeth I officially opened Britain's first purpose-built trading centre on this very spot, between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street. Before that moment, merchants had been conducting serious business in muddy streets and crowded taverns, haggling over fortunes with rain dripping down their necks.
The man who changed all that was Sir Thomas Gresham, a wealthy merchant who had worked as a royal financial agent in Antwerp, a city that was then one of Europe's great trading capitals. He funded the entire construction himself, modelling the building on Antwerp's famous Bourse. But Gresham had ambitions beyond just a trading floor, so he added two retail levels on top, filling them with around 100 shops and creating what was effectively Britain's first shopping mall. The Queen herself became one of the first customers.
The original building burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and its successor burned again in 1838. The elegant structure you see now, with those grand Corinthian columns, was designed by architect William Tite and opened by Queen Victoria in 1844.
Three buildings, two catastrophic fires, and commerce just kept going. London was never going to let a little thing like disaster get in the way of a good deal.
Sources. Story: en.wikipedia.org Photos: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
