Brewing a Legacy: The Story of Edward Lloyd

with Howard Benge, Director of The Insurance Museum

Three hundred years before global markets and skyscrapers, there was a man with a coffee pot and an idea.

Edward Lloyd didn’t come from money. He wasn’t an underwriter, a broker, or a banker. He was a London coffee-house owner in the late 1600s, serving merchants, ship captains, and traders in a city still rising from the ashes of the Great Fire. Yet from his small café on Tower Street, and later Lombard Street, Lloyd built something extraordinary: a meeting place where information, trust, and risk came together.

In this episode of Humanizing Insurance, Daniel Grimwood-Bird sits down with Howard Benge, Director of the Insurance Museum, to rediscover the real man behind one of the most famous names in insurance. Together they explore the world of 17th-century London - a city of coffee houses, maritime trade, and entrepreneurial energy - and trace how Lloyd’s simple idea of gathering people around conversation became the foundation of a global insurance market.

They discuss:

• How coffee houses became the “WeWorks” of their day - buzzing centres of trade, gossip, and deal-making.
• How the Lloyd's Coffee House we know today, celebrated by the blue plaque on Lombard Street, wasn't it's original home - and why Lloyd moved it.
• The way he gathered news, data, and sea captains to create one of the first real-time information hubs in history.
• How his brand endured long after his death, and why the name Lloyd still defines credibility three centuries later.

Howard also shares the mission behind the Insurance Museum, a project dedicated to preserving the human stories of an industry that quietly underwrites our world.

This is a conversation about legacy, curiosity, and the entrepreneurial spark that built an institution from nothing more than coffee, community, and courage.

Humanizing Insurance is bought to you by Daniel Grimwood-Bird. It's a passion project, driven by the evergreen phrase 'Insurance is a people industry'.

Through each conversation, we explore the stories, experiences, and ideas that make our world of insurance more human - from the pioneers and innovators shaping its future to the quiet leaders who hold its traditions together.

This podcast exists to remind us that behind every policy, premium, and claim is a person, someone making decisions, taking risks, and protecting what matters most.

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