Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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Wikipedia
Lombard Street is a street in the City of London, between Bank junction (the location of Bank tube station and the Bank of England) and Gracechurch Street.
From the junction at Bank, where Mansion House Street, Poultry, Princes Street, Threadneedle Street and Cornhill all converge, Lombard Street runs southeast before bearing left into a more easterly direction (the southeast-bound roadway continues in the form of King William Street) before terminating at a junction with Gracechurch Street. (Traffic may continue straight on from this junction into Fenchurch Street.)
The nearest London Underground stations to Lombard Street are Bank and Monument. Mainline railway stations at Cannon Street and Fenchurch Street are also close by.
[edit] History
Lombard Street was originally a piece of land granted by King Edward I to goldsmiths from the part of northern Italy known as Lombardy (larger than the modern region of Lombardy).
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It is the site of the church of St Mary Woolnoth. The church of St Edmund, King and Martyr also stands on the street, on the north side close to Gracechurch Street. Destroyed during the Great Fire of London in 1666, St Edmund's was rebuilt during the 1670s by Christopher Wren. It is no longer open for regular worship, though, and now performs service as the London Centre for Spirituality.
Lloyd's Coffee House, which eventually became the world's leading insurance market Lloyd's of London, moved to Lombard Street near the General Post Office from Tower Street in 1691. Lloyd's is now located in Lime Street, where its newest building was completed in 1986.
No. 54 was the long-standing headquarters of Barclays before the financial institution moved to One Churchill Place in Canary Wharf. Until the 1980s, most UK-based banks had their head offices in Lombard Street and historically it has been the London home for money lenders.
[edit] Language and literature
In literature it is generally written as "Lombard-street". The spacing and the capitalisation of Street were not common until well into the second half of the 20th century. For example, Harold Pinter has a scene about people attempting to get to (or from) Bolsover-street,[1] and John Betjeman's poem Early Electric calls it Oxford-street (which earlier was Oxford Road, and is the source of the A4, Great Western Road).
'Lombard-street to a China orange' is an old-fashioned idiom meaning very heavily weighted odds; Lombard-street signifying wealth and a China orange, poverty.[2][3]
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market is a book by the economics philosopher Walter Bagehot, published in 1873. Bagehot was one of the first writers to describe and explain the world of international and corporate finance, banking, and money in understandable language. The book was in part a reaction to the 1866 collapse of Overend, Gurney and Company, located at No. 65, Lombard Street, from which the title draws its name.
[edit] People
Gregory de Rokesley, eight-times Lord Mayor of London from 1274 to 1281 and in 1285, lived in a building on the site of what is now No. 72, Lombard Street, and Pope's Head Alley.
The poet Alexander Pope was born at No. 32 in 1688.
[edit] References
- ^ "Traffic", London, 62, Granta Books [not specific enough to verify]
- ^ "Opening a Pandora's Box: Proper Names in English Phraseology", Patrizia Pierini (36), April 2008, http://www.linguistik-online.de/36_08/pierini.html, retrieved 2009-054-04
- ^ poputonian (nickname) (11 September 2006), Hullabaloo, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/collective-guilt-and-punishment-worse.html, retrieved 2009-05-04 This is not of itself notable; but added as proof that it is still used in general idiom.
[edit] See also
Coordinates: 51°30′43″N 0°05′13″W / 51.512°N 0.087°W / 51.512; -0.087
Annotations
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Named after the Bankers of Lombardy in Italy, still the centre of the banking industry in London, you can see all the old signs still hanging outside the buildings.