A framed and mounted hand-coloured engraving showing the Royal Exchange in its second form as designed and built by the architect Edward Jarman in 1669.

Both Thomas Bowles and his brother John were deeply involved in the London print trade in the late 18th Century. The Bowles family commissioned, created and sold prints from their premises in St Pauls Churchyard for many generations. As well as drawing, engraving and publishing topograpgical prints of London landmarks the Bowles family also produced maps and contributed plates to Seymour’s Survey of London (1734).

The Royal Exchange, the brain-child of Sir Thomas Gresham opened by HM Queen Elizabeth I on the 23rd January 1571 and modelled on the Antwerp Bourse was Britains first specialised commercial building. Gresham’s original was lost in the Great Fire of 1666 and a replacement by the surveyor and carpenter Edward Jarman. In 1821 Jarman’s building too burned to the ground and was eventually replaced by the famous portico and pediment of Sir William Tite which remains today at the junction of Cornhill and Threadneedle Street.