Edward Lloyd's coffee house on Tower Street, London, became the informal gathering place for merchants, shipowners, and underwriters to arrange marine insurance, evolving by 1774 into Lloyd's of London as a formal insurance market.

The coffeehouse culture that produced Lloyd's was also the nursery of Augustan literary life; Addison, Steele, Pope, and Swift frequented coffeehouses as spaces of news, debate, and publication, making the worlds of commerce and letters inseparable in early eighteenth-century London.