ABSTRACT
The now ageing, 47,000 sq.m. Lloyd’s 1986 Building is established as a Modernist icon and has become an accepted part of the City fabric, even if it is now overtaken in the glamour stakes by newer neighbours such as Foster’s St. Mary Axe building (the ‘Erotic Gherkin’), Rogers’ own Lloyds Register around the corner, and suffering a degree of internal abuse. As a design, the building makes little sense located outside the context of the client’s status and history: one of the most prestigious, respectable, and long-established institutions within the secretive world of the Square Mile, an insurance market where so-called ‘Names’ gamble their wealth against the possible misfortune of others through the medium of insurance underwriters and brokers. It was after one of the worst periods of such misfortune and the beginning of a new mass market for insurance that Lloyds found itself needing and able to move itself from premises in the Royal Exchange to a new, custom-designed building in
Leadenhall Street. That was in 1923 and the completed ‘1928 Building’ was designed by Sir Edwin Cooper (1873 - 1942). The fundamental organisation of this building (a large and high trading fl oor, with a formal entrance used by few and a secondary entrance used by most people, with cores at the corners) was followed through in each of the subsequent buildings Lloyd’s constructed, including the Rogers’ design.
