Tooley Street is a road in central and south London connecting London Bridge to St Saviour's Dock; it runs past Tower Bridge on the Southwark/Bermondsey side of the River Thames, and forms part of the A200 road. (grid reference TQ3380.)

The earliest name for the street recorded in the Rolls is the neutral regio vicio i.e. "royal street", meaning a public highway. In the "Woodcut" map of c.1561 it is shown as "Barms Street", i.e. street to Bermondsey; in the Stuart period it was referred to as "Short Southwark" to differentiate it from "Long Southwark" (the present Borough High Street).

The later "Tooley" designation is a corruption of the original Church of St Olave and the transformation can be seen on maps of the area from those of Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, John Rocque, and later, which name the church "Synt Toulus", "Toulas", "Toolis", "Toolies". The church takes its name from the Norwegian King Olaf who was an ally of Æthelred the Unready and attacked Cnut's forces occupying the London Bridge area in 1013. The earliest reference to the church is in the Southwark entry in Domesday Book of 1086. The church was a little to the east of London Bridge of the period. The church was demolished in 1926 for the headquarters of the Hay's Wharf Company, "St Olaf House", an office block built 1929–31 by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887–1959) in Art Deco style. This has a legend and mural depiction of the Saint.

The termination of the street is not actually at the junction with Borough High Street, as often assumed, for that part of the highway is actually Duke Street Hill. Tooley Street actually joins Montague Close under the arch of London Bridge a little to the north of this.

This fire happened at a time when the fire 'brigade', formally known as the London Fire Engine Establishment, was still run by insurance companies. It began on 22 June 1861 in a warehouse at Cotton's Wharf in Tooley Street and raged for two days, destroying many nearby buildings. It was two weeks before the fire went out completely. The head of the Establishment, James Braidwood, was killed by a falling wall while fighting the fire. It was one of the largest fires in London during the 19th century.

Afterwards the insurance companies raised their premiums and threatened to disband the brigade until finally the government agreed to take it over. The Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act was passed in 1865 and led to a publicly funded fire service – the first real London fire brigade.

In the early 1930s George Orwell lived as a tramp to gain a first-hand view of poverty. He befriended a man called Ginger in the hop-fields of Kent. They came to a "kip" (doss-house) in Tooley Street and stayed there from 19 September to 8 October 1931. Orwell wrote rough notes in the kip then went further along Tooley Street to Bermondsey Library where he wrote them up into the book Down and Out in Paris and London. The library building was demolished in the 1980s and the site is now part of the open space called Potter's Fields.

The most famous wharf of the south side of the Pool of London was Hay's Wharf, first mentioned in 1651 to the east of St Olave's church. For 300 years it grew, until Tooley Street and the surrounding industrial development was nicknamed "London's Larder". The warehouses burned down in the 1861 fire (see above). Hay's Wharf was where Ernest Shackleton's ship Quest lay in 1921. This dock was filled in during extensive rebuilding in the 1980s and is now a shopping mall called Hay's Galleria. The office block attached to it is called "Shackleton House". Nearby, at No. 27 is the private London Bridge Hospital in the St Olaf House building.