A new museum is being planned that shows off the history of insurance in London – no, wait, come back, it’s not that bad.

Insurance in London has a long history, predating the Great Fire of London, although that’s the event that was instrumental in highlighting the need for fire insurance as so many people lost so much in the fire. In the early days, fire fighting and fire insurance were the same thing, and if you wander around the City, you can still see insurance plaques on buildings telling the firemen that they would be paid for putting out a fire.

From those early days, insurance spread like wildfire to cover everything and anything and is now a major part of the City of London’s business. So much so that quite often, when photos of the City are used in articles about banks, they show the insurance cluster. For example, the Gherkin skyscraper was built by Swiss Re, an insurance firm, and they put it there to be close to other insurers.

The new museum is currently online only, but is fundraising to build a physical museum.

The initiate for the new museum and website was the brainchild of Reg Brown, an insurance veteran and former Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) President.

As it happens, the CII used to have a museum in their head office, and indeed, quite a few websites think it still does. I even popped along a few years back to see if it still existed, and the receptionist after checking with a few people was able to confirm that it had closed a few years before I visited.

Now they are working to open a replacement museum, hopefully in the heart of London’s insurance cluster.

The website, and their first exhibition about the Great Fire of London is here — but note it doesn’t work that well on mobile phones, so wait until you can try it on a big screen instead.