To the south of the Royal Exchange, in Change Alley, centred, in the first quarter of the 18th century, the excitement attending the South Sea Bubble affair. This was the great stock gambling scheme by which the South Sea Company, holding a monopoly of the trade with the South Seas, and trading on the extravagant ideas the public had of such trade, created an extraordinary desire in many persons to participate in the fabulous profits. The company was carried on by fraud and deceit until the bubble burst and caused disaster and ruin to thousands of unwise investors. Gay, in his "Panegyrical Epistle," writing of the South Sea project said:
Why did 'Change Alley waste thy precious hours
Among the fools who gaped for golden showers?
No wonder they were caught by South Sea schemes
Who ne'er enjoyed a guinea but in dreams.
Garraway's Coffee House in Change Alley was used chiefly by the Bubble traders in 1720. At this house in 1651, tea was first sold in England, the proprietor in his announcement recommending it as a cure for all disorders. It certainly has been used extensively ever since. Next door was Jonathan's Coffee House, another tavern of long existence. Both places were burned in 1748, and a bank now marks where they once were.
Plough Court opens out of the south side of Lombard Street. The court is notable as the birthplace of Alexander Pope, and his father here kept a linen draper shop.
In the church of St. Edmund, which has stood for a century and a quarter on the north side of Lombard Street, Joseph Addison was married in 1716, just after the amazing success of his "Tragedy of Cato," to the Dowager Countess of Warwick—a marriage which Thackeray referred to as "his splendid but dismal union." Three years later Addison died.
Quaint and curious is the position of All Hallows, known as the invisible church, literally buried by surrounding houses and approached only through a narrow alley on the north side of Lombard Street. It was in an open space when it was completed in 1694, but the buildings of the City have gradually crowded about it, as though trying to crush it out of existence.
St. Margaret Pattens, in Eastcheap at the Rood Lane corner, is a church of 1678, designed by Wren, and taking its name from the district in which, in the 17th century, pattens were generally sold. Dr. Thomas Birch, author of the "Memoirs of the Reign of Elizabeth," was long its rector. He died in 1766 and was buried beneath the chancel.
Mincing Lane borrowed its name from the Minchens or nuns of St. Helen, and this order once owned all the ground hereabouts.