A new museum is being planned that shows off the history of insurance in London – no, wait, come back, it’s not that bad.

Insurance in London has a long history, predating the Great Fire of London, although that’s the event that was instrumental in highlighting the need for fire insurance as so many people lost so much in the fire. In the early days, fire fighting and fire insurance were the same thing, and if you wander around the City, you can still see insurance plaques on buildings telling the firemen that they would be paid for putting out a fire.

From those early days, insurance spread like wildfire to cover everything and anything and is now a major part of the City of London’s business. So much so that quite often, when photos of the City are used in articles about banks, they show the insurance cluster. For example, the Gherkin skyscraper was built by Swiss Re, an insurance firm, and they put it there to be close to other insurers.

The new museum is currently online only, but is fundraising to build a physical museum.

The initiate for the new museum and website was the brainchild of Reg Brown, an insurance veteran and former Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) President.

As it happens, the CII used to have a museum in their head office, and indeed, quite a few websites think it still does. I even popped along a few years back to see if it still existed, and the receptionist after checking with a few people was able to confirm that it had closed a few years before I visited.

Now they are working to open a replacement museum, hopefully in the heart of London’s insurance cluster.

The website, and their first exhibition about the Great Fire of London is here — but note it doesn’t work that well on mobile phones, so wait until you can try it on a big screen instead.

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2 comments
  1. Lixin Zeng says:
    17 September 2022 at 1:02 pm

    Already watched the Great Fire of London. Great Job! Hope to see more historical memories.

  2. Chris Rogers says:
    18 September 2022 at 9:15 am

    In Paris you can visit a museum about finance – loans, value, inflation, money etc etc. It’s got lots of buttons and screens, is very new and up to date, etc but what’s much better is that it’s housed inside a 19th century mansion built in the Renaissance style but taken over by a bank in the 1920s, including a stunning basement vault that you reach via bridge over a moat that runs around the whole thing and was inspected by a cradle on a track. It’s great: search for Citéco

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