Thames Street, London Thames Street, London Thames Street, divided into Lower and Upper Thames Street, is a road in the City of London, the historic and financial centre of London. It forms part of the busy A3211 route (prior to being rebuilt as a major thoroughfare in the late 1960s, it was the B132) from Tower Hill to Westminster. The London Bridge underpass marks the divide between Upper and Lower Thames Street, with Lower to the east and Upper to the west. Thames Street is mentioned in the diary of Samuel Pepys. The first mention of the road, however, is from 1013 when
Tunnels underneath the River Thames the Port of London, which until the 1980s required large ships to be able to access the river as far upstream as the City of London. Until the construction of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge in 1991, the easternmost bridge on the Thames was Tower Bridge in central London. Even now, the Dartford Crossing provides the only way to cross the Thames by road between London and the sea (with predictable results for traffic congestion). The width of the river downstream meant that tunnels were the only options for crossings before improvements in technology allowed the construction of high bridges