
North end of King William Street looking towards Monument tube station.
'King William Street' is the name of a street in the
City of London,
England. It runs from a junction at the
Bank of England, meeting
Poultry,
Lombard Street and
Threadneedle Street, south-east, where it meets a junction with
Gracechurch and
Cannon Street. It continues south after this junction, and becomes
London Bridge.
The nearest tube stations are
Bank and Monument. The disused
King William Street tube station was sited on this road, on the corner of Monument Street.
The road houses a number of investment banks and City firms.
Rothschild's main London office occupies No. 1 King William Street originally built as the head office of
The London Assurance.
King William Street is mentioned in
T.S. Eliot's poem
The Waste Land. Lines 60–68 read:
:Unreal City,
:Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
:A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
:I had not thought death had undone so many.
:Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
:And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
:Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
:To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
:With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
At the time he wrote this section, Eliot was working for a bank, and not enjoying the experience.