My Lord Mayor, Lady Mayoress, Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen. Almost 350 years ago, the Great Fire destroyed the City of London and rendered 100,000 people homeless. It took half a century to rebuild. The legacy of the Great Fire endures, including such Wren masterpieces as St Paul’s and his twenty-five other steeples that survive today within the City’s precincts. But the Fire’s legacy is not limited to how the City looks, it extends to what the City does. The blaze led Nicholas Barbon to establish the first insurance company, an innovation to fulfil a social need: the sharing of risk. Public authorities ... (full story)