Hey friends, welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast.

This is the weekly highlight reel of videos that I have put out on YouTube.

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And then what I've started doing is weekly highlight reels of some of the videos that have gone out on YouTube that would be of interest to the podcast listeners as well.

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And there I am.

So let's get right into it. In the days before there were malls

that looked exactly alike in every city. How did people go about getting both their needs

as well as the occasional fun thing? And were there even fun things? And what were they? Where did

people go before Target? And that is wrapped up in the

story of the Royal Exchange and Thomas Gresham. So in 1563, Thomas Gresham, a wealthy London merchant

and trader who had close ties to Antwerp, we're going to talk about that. He offered to the city

of London that he would build a trading floor similar to that in Antwerp, where merchants could

get together and do business. They could exchange news on ships and goods, and they could meet

with each other to discuss their contracts. At this point, there were no office towers and no shared

office space. So if you wanted to do deals, you did them either at each other's homes or at some

kind of public space. Later on in the 17th century,

coffee houses would be really popular places for merchants to meet up. But the first coffee house

in London didn't open up until the 1660s. As a side note, I love that people would meet up in

...