202 L McFall
tenure as CEO, to provide the company with a digital footprint. This use of
bricks and buildings to make statements about insurance is nothing new. As
I describe in this chapter, insurance companies, throughout most of their
history, have relied on buildings to convey messages about the substance
and weight of their intangible business. If you look, the architectural remnants of these statements can be seen in cities everywhere; vast buildings
often repurposed as hotels or serviced offices. Underneath this, and much
harder to see, is the way insurance has transformed the city beyond its own
buildings. This is something that, excepting one or two important studies
of the US context (Rubin 2009; Hanchett 2000), has barely been researched.
My aim here is to address some questions about the relationship between
insurance buildings, their brands, and their broader capital, especially property, investment strategies. To do this, I review the role buildings played in
the initial establishment of trust and how this began to shape the urban
environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I close by looking
again at the architectural precedents Aviva’s garage was following. This
architectural style is stock-image Silicon Valley/Alley and in two of the largest insurtech companies, Lemonade and Hippo, it is also used as a direct
expression of corporate brand values. These companies have a story to tell
about insurance that is quite different to the one told by legacy insurers.
Their narrative is about disruption rather than stability but in using bricks
to signify brands, to consumers, and more particularly investors, they stay
within the bounds of a marketing strategy that has roots in the eighteenth
century.
Trust in print, trust in buildings
As their corporate website chronicles, Aviva has a history stretching back
to the 1690s (Aviva 2021). The website identifies their first constituent company as Hand in Hand, a mutual society that was one of the first fire insurance offices. This is roughly accurate, but it elides a few interesting details.
Hand in Hand was not, in fact, the first name the company was known by; it
acquired the name, as Clow (2020) explains, as an incidental by-product of
the way the first fire offices conducted their business. Proposals for a system
of fire insurance had circulated throughout the seventeenth century but it
was only in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London that they began to
take on concrete form in the shape of a scheme proposed by the Corporation
of London. Before the Corporation’s scheme was fully established, it was
crowded out by an alternative, privately backed scheme, modelled on
almost identical lines, that became the first fire office. Initially this scheme
was identified only as a ‘new office.’ After its formal establishment in 1682, it
referred to itself as the ‘Insurance Office’ and sometimes as the ‘Fire Office’
which it adopted as its official name from 1693. This name persisted until
competing offices, notably The Amicable and The Friendly Society, began
to be set-up prompting the Insurance Office to switch to an alternative that
tenure as CEO, to provide the company with a digital footprint. This use of
bricks and buildings to make statements about insurance is nothing new. As
I describe in this chapter, insurance companies, throughout most of their
history, have relied on buildings to convey messages about the substance
and weight of their intangible business. If you look, the architectural remnants of these statements can be seen in cities everywhere; vast buildings
often repurposed as hotels or serviced offices. Underneath this, and much
harder to see, is the way insurance has transformed the city beyond its own
buildings. This is something that, excepting one or two important studies
of the US context (Rubin 2009; Hanchett 2000), has barely been researched.
My aim here is to address some questions about the relationship between
insurance buildings, their brands, and their broader capital, especially property, investment strategies. To do this, I review the role buildings played in
the initial establishment of trust and how this began to shape the urban
environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I close by looking
again at the architectural precedents Aviva’s garage was following. This
architectural style is stock-image Silicon Valley/Alley and in two of the largest insurtech companies, Lemonade and Hippo, it is also used as a direct
expression of corporate brand values. These companies have a story to tell
about insurance that is quite different to the one told by legacy insurers.
Their narrative is about disruption rather than stability but in using bricks
to signify brands, to consumers, and more particularly investors, they stay
within the bounds of a marketing strategy that has roots in the eighteenth
century.
Trust in print, trust in buildings
As their corporate website chronicles, Aviva has a history stretching back
to the 1690s (Aviva 2021). The website identifies their first constituent company as Hand in Hand, a mutual society that was one of the first fire insurance offices. This is roughly accurate, but it elides a few interesting details.
Hand in Hand was not, in fact, the first name the company was known by; it
acquired the name, as Clow (2020) explains, as an incidental by-product of
the way the first fire offices conducted their business. Proposals for a system
of fire insurance had circulated throughout the seventeenth century but it
was only in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London that they began to
take on concrete form in the shape of a scheme proposed by the Corporation
of London. Before the Corporation’s scheme was fully established, it was
crowded out by an alternative, privately backed scheme, modelled on
almost identical lines, that became the first fire office. Initially this scheme
was identified only as a ‘new office.’ After its formal establishment in 1682, it
referred to itself as the ‘Insurance Office’ and sometimes as the ‘Fire Office’
which it adopted as its official name from 1693. This name persisted until
competing offices, notably The Amicable and The Friendly Society, began
to be set-up prompting the Insurance Office to switch to an alternative that