The places the poem names in London, and its river. London Bridge, King William Street and St Mary Woolnoth lie on one route, the way City workers came in from London Bridge station; it ends a short walk from Lloyds Bank, where Eliot worked. The Strand, Queen Victoria Street, Lower Thames Street and St Magnus Martyr make a second route, in Part III. The river’s places run from Richmond and Kew past Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs to Margate Sands, where the third of the three Thames-daughters, the women who speak in turn at the end of Part III, speaks. Click a place for its lines. The river is drawn from OpenStreetMap data.
The City
The City between the Cannon Street Hotel and Billingsgate, with the buildings the poem names or points to, drawn as they stood in 1922: St Mary Woolnoth, the church by Nicholas Hawksmoor at the north end of King William Street, whose clock strikes nine at line 68; London Bridge, the bridge designed by John Rennie and opened in 1831, which the crowd crosses in Part I; St Magnus the Martyr, Christopher Wren’s church at the foot of the bridge; and the Cannon Street Hotel, where Mr. Eugenides asked the speaker to lunch. Click a building for its lines.
Grey dots are places from Eliot’s own life that the poem does not name.
The poem’s world
The places named in the poem and its epigraph, with a few more from Eliot’s notes, joined by a line in the order they come in the text, from Cumae, the Sibyl’s town in the epigraph, to Himavant in Part V. The Starnbergersee near Munich is the first place the poem itself names (line 8); Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose money paid for the first performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the opera quoted at lines 31 to 34 and 42, was found dead in it in 1886. Grey dots, as above, are places from Eliot’s own life.
Europe and the Mediterranean, drawn large
Most of the places the poem names lie within a few hundred miles of one another, from Bradford and Margate to Jerusalem and Alexandria, and on the world map their names crowd together. Here they are drawn large, joined by the line of the poem, which leaves the map for Sydney at line 199 and for the Ganges in Part V. Click a place for its lines.