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 on the site of the first clubhouse of the Gresham Club.
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.
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Last updated on Friday June 20, 2008 at 03:43:27 PDT (GMT -0700)
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