<strong>George Edmund Street</strong>
<strong>Geoff Brandwood</strong> <strong>(ed Peter Howell and Peter Taylor)</strong>
<strong>Historic England and The Victorian Society, £40, 312 pages</strong>
George Edmund Street (1824-1881) was nothing if not a deeply devout High Church Anglican. He was Vicar’s Warden at All Saints, Margaret Street, from 1867 to 1871, and his numerous churches were predominantly built for Anglo-Catholic patrons. The Catholic Pugin was obviously a profound influence on this determined Gothicist and the equally Catholic Leonard Stokes worked in Street’s studio in the 1870s. The only Catholic competition he submitted a design for was a rather unsatisfactory one for Lille Cathedral.
This admirable monograph, the first on Street, was in the main written by Geoff Brandwood, sometime chairman of the Victorian Society – and author of monographs on Sharpe, Paley & Austin and on Temple Moore – before his sudden and lamented death in November 2021. The Catholic Peter Howell and the now-also-late Peter Taylor prepared the work for publication; it is lavishly and well illustrated.
Street was a prolific architect, one of the greatest of all those working in the years of the Victorian Gothic Revival, and was responsible for some 150 new churches and chapels. On his death his obituarist in The Builder wrote that “Mr Street was probably one of the most indefatigable workers ever known in the architectural profession.” One slight irony, given his profound faith, is that he is probably best known for his commission for the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, at the heart of London.
Street was born in Essex and educated in south London. He was pupilled to Gilbert Scott from 1844 to 1849, when he moved to Wantage to become architect to the Diocese of Oxford. He travelled widely through Europe, after 1852 with his wife Mariquita Proctor. In 1855 he published Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: A Note of a Tour in the North of Italy, and a year later he transferred his practice to London.
The monograph covers Street’s career, his churches, his secular works (many Anglican clergy houses) and his collaboration on stained glass and textiles. A very complete gazetteer is provided. His commitment to Gothic was total and he regarded the years around 1300 as the pinnacle of medieval achievement.
French influence pervaded Street’s work, as can be seen in his apsidal chancels, stone vaulting, round and semicircular turrets and saddleback towers. Italy contributed a fascination with brick polychromy, as can be seen at All Saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead and St James the Less, Vauxhall Bridge Road, London.
Street has been fortunate in the survival of the vast majority of his urban churches, the only major loss being that of All Saints, Clifton, Bristol, which was bombed in 1940 and demolished in 1964. Most of his other major urban churches – St Peter’s, Bournemouth; St Saviour’s, Eastbourne; St Margaret of Antioch, Toxteth; St John the Divine, Kennington; St Mary Magdalene, Paddington; and Ss Philip and James, Oxford – still stand proudly upright, although the last (“Pip ’n’ Jim”) has been repurposed.
Many of his smaller rural churches, mainly but not exclusively in Oxford diocese, can still be found. Kingston in Dorset was built for the 3rd Earl of Eldon, whose descendants became Catholic through a marriage with a Fraser. Sir Tatton Sykes, 5th Baronet, of Sledmere in the East Riding was a generous patron and commissioned Street to build some half a dozen churches around his 32,000-acre estate; St Peter’s, Helperthorpe was probably the grandest of these. Sir Tatton’s wife, Christina Cavendish-Bentinck, “poped” in 1882 and brought up her son Mark (of Sykes-Picot Treaty fame) as a Catholic, doubtless to the considerable irritation of her High-Anglican husband.
Street also built churches for the Anglican Church in Europe. The Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople was built in 1864-8 and still flourishes after various vicissitudes. Holy Ghost, Genoa was built in 1868-72, with “formidably strong black and white banding.” All Saints on the Via del Babuino in Rome (some 100 yards from the Spanish Steps) was begun in red-brick Gothic from 1881 and completed by Street’s son, AE Street, in the years after his father’s death.
In mid-1881, at the early age of 57, Street’s health suddenly deteriorated. He gave his presidential address to RIBA on November 7; shortly afterwards he had a stroke and died on December 18. Lord Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy, ensured he was accorded a public funeral and buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, where his resting place was in due course marked by a brass by Bodley & Garner. This monograph is a fitting tribute to a great architect.
<em>Michael Hodges is the Herald’s architectural correspondent</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the June issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
