Thames Street, London
Thames Street, now divided into Upper Thames Street and Lower Thames Street is a street in London. It runs north shore of the Thames from Blackfriars by the City of London and is close to the Tower of London on the Byward Street. For the first time it is mentioned in the year 1013, Samuel Pepys speaks of it in his diary. Since an expansion in the 1960s runs on her cross-country road A3211. The boundary between Upper and Lower Thames Street runs under the crossing under the London Bridge. The street is the longest in the City of London. The Thames Street is closely associated with the London's maritime trade. Since the time of the Romans there were docks and warehouses.
History
Due to its central location on the Thames, there are still many testimonies of English history. In the Thames Street there was the Roman house, from which a continuous use until the 5th century is known. In the 19th and 20th centuries, its vaults were still accessible by the London Coal Exchange, until it was destroyed in 1962. In the 4th century was in the street the largest collection of Christian churches in the city.
In the 17th century stood in the Thames Street numerous warehouses, in which, inter alia, oil, hemp, flax, pitch, and tar were. When the Great Fire of London of 1666, the incipient fire spread to the Thames Street and its warehouses, it became the uncontrollable conflagration.
Important buildings
- Tower of London. Lower Thames Street,
- Old Billingsgate Market. Lower Thames Street, place where the Roman port Londinium was, as here, the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century a port built. Also, the first known wholesale market of the city.
- Custom House, City of London. In addition to the Old Billingsgate Market. Served in various forms for many centuries for the collection of import duties.
- St Michael Paternoster Royal. Upper Thames Street, Church of Christopher Wren built after the fire of London.
- All Hallows -the -Great. Church.
- St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street. Church by Christopher Wren.
- St Botolph Billingsgate, cemetery. Related destroyed church in the Fire of London and not rebuilt.
Reception
As a central thoroughfare in central London, the Thames Street dipped repeatedly in British literature. Kate Nickleby from the Charles Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby goes through the Thames Street to work. The stories of Sherlock Holmes play repeatedly in the maze of streets at the Thames Street or on this myself. In T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land are several lines of Thames Street and past St Magnus the Martyr Church in mind:
At the time of Eliot wrote the poem, Billingsgate Market was still active, and especially fishermen and fishmongers from his environment populated the Lower Thames Street. Since its development in the 1960s, the road is known primarily for steady traffic and associated noise.