King William Street is the name of a street in the City of London

City of London

The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. It runs from a junction at the Bank of England

Bank of England

The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694, it is the second oldest central bank in the world...

, meeting Poultry

Cheapside

Cheapside is a street in the City of London that links Newgate Street with the junction of Queen Victoria Street and Mansion House Street. To the east is Mansion House, the Bank of England, and the major road junction above Bank tube station. To the west is St. Paul's Cathedral, St...

, Lombard Street

Lombard Street, London

Lombard Street is a street in the City of London.It runs from the corner of the Bank of England at its north-west end, where it meets a major junction including Poultry, King William Street, and Threadneedle Street, south-east to Gracechurch Street....

 and Threadneedle Street

Threadneedle Street

Threadneedle Street is a street in the City of London, leading from a junction with Poultry, Cornhill, King William Street and Lombard Street, to Bishopsgate....

, south-east, where it meets a junction with Gracechurch and Cannon Street

Cannon Street

Cannon Street is a road in the south of the City of London. It runs roughly parallel with the River Thames, and about 250 metres north of it. It is the site of the ancient London Stone.-Etymology:...

. It continues south after this junction, and becomes London Bridge

London Bridge

London Bridge is a bridge over the River Thames, connecting the City of London and Southwark, in central London. Situated between Cannon Street Railway Bridge and Tower Bridge, it forms the western end of the Pool of London...

.

The nearest tube stations are Bank and Monument

Bank and Monument stations

Bank and Monument are interlinked London Underground and Docklands Light Railway stations that form a public transport complex spanning the length of King William Street in the City of London. Bank station, named after the Bank of England, opened in 1900 and is served by the Central, Northern and...

. The disused King William Street tube station

King William Street tube station

King William Street was the original but short-lived northern terminus of the City & South London Railway , the first deep tube underground railway in London and one of the component parts of the London Underground's Northern Line. It was in the City of London, on King William Street, just south...

 was sited on this road, on the corner of Monument Street.

The road houses a number of investment banks and City firms. Rothschild's

N M Rothschild & Sons

N M Rothschild & Sons is a private investment banking company, belonging to the Rothschild family...

 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

Gresham Club

The Gresham Club was a City of London gentlemen's club, founded in 1843 and dissolved in 1991.-Formation and membership:The Club was founded in 1843 as a dining club for the professional classes of the City of London, and named after Sir Thomas Gresham, a celebrated Elizabethan merchant who founded...

.

King William Street is mentioned in T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's poem The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

. 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 of London.