King William Street (London)

King William Street is a road in the City of London. It runs from its northern end at a junction at the Bank of England, meeting Poultry, Lombard Street and Threadneedle Street, southeast to a junction with Gracechurch Street and Cannon Street. It continues south after this junction, and becomes London Bridge.

The nearest London Underground stations are Bank and Monument. The disused King William Street tube station was sited on the road, on the corner of Monument Street.

The road houses a number of investment banks and City firms. Rothschild's main London office occupies 1 King William Street, originally built as the head office of London Assurance Corporation on the site of the first clubhouse of the Gresham Club. Adelaide House, a Grade II listed building, is located at its southern end, adjacent to London Bridge.

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 in the City.

Coordinates: 51°30′34″N 0°5′13″W / 51.50944°N 0.08694°W / 51.50944; -0.08694