Many archaeologists believe that Narrow Street represents the line of the medieval river wall. This wall was built to reclaim riverside marshland and to protect it from the tides.

A combination of tides and currents made this point on the Thames a natural landfall for ships. The first wharf was complete in 1348. Lime kilns or oasts (’lymehostes’) used in the production of mortar and pottery were built here in the fourteenth century.

Houses were then built, on the wall itself at first, but then outwards onto the foreshore by a process of encroachment. Indeed, the eastern end of Narrow Street was previously known as Fore Street.

The area grew rapidly in Elizabethan times as a centre for world trade. The neighbourhood supplied ships with ropes and other necessities; pottery was also made here for the ships. Ship chandlers settled here building wooden houses and wharves in the cramped space between street and river.

By the time of the reign of James I nearly half of the area’s population of 2000 were mariners.

Narrow Street may take its name from the closeness of the original buildings. A 1865 report to Parliament noted that no part of Narrow Street was "wider than 25 feet".

In 1661, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of a visit to a porcelain factory in Narrow Street alighting via Duke Shore Stairs while en route to view work on boats being built for herring fishing.

The Limehouse Cut for barges, which ran under Narrow Street and led to the Lee Navigation, was established in 1766. In 1772, Smith & Sykes ran a sugar house in Narrow Street - a small factory that baked and refined sugar.

In the eighteenth century a small group of Chinese sailors from Canton and Southern China settled along the old Limehouse Causeway creating the original London Chinatown. The Chinese community later moved to Soho following the Blitz.

Limehouse Basin was built in 1820 to allow the transfer of goods to barges on the Regent’s Canal. The Narrow Street Swing Bridge is sited between the Limehouse Basin Lock and the Thames. Limehouse Basin was one of the first docks to close in the late 1960s.

For much of the 20th century the area was dominated by the tall chimney of Stepney Power Station at Blyth Wharf, which has since been demolished. In 1977 the north side of Narrow Street was demolished.

Nicholas Hawksmoors’ Church St Anne’s Limehouse was designated a conservation area by the London Docklands Development Corporation in the 1980s.

Access to the area was always difficult, with the dock standing to the north, and the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel at one end. In 1993 the 1.8 kilometre Limehouse Link tunnel was completed, further restricting traffic to the riverside area.

On the south side of Narrow Street is a rare example of an early Georgian brick terrace. With the exception of the westernmost property (The Grapes public house) it was standing derelict and abandoned, but in 1964 the writer Andrew Sinclair bought and saved one of the houses. A number of his freinds bought others.

The Grapes (formerly The Bunch of Grapes and known to the young Charles Dickens) was notably bought in 2011 by actor Sir Ian McKellen, director Sean Mathias and Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev.

The late twentieth century brought much development to the area, with the erection of the Canary Wharf tower close by. Since the 1990s, many new apartment complexes have been built around the Limehouse Basin as well as Victorian warehouse conversions.