George Edmund Street

George Edmund Street, Geoff Brandwood, edited by Peter Howell and Peter CW Taylor, Liverpool University Press for Historic England and The Victorian Society, 2024. 300 pages, 180 illustrations in colour and black-and-white, paperback.

Until now George Edmund Street (1824–1881) was ‘the most important Victorian architect about whom a monograph has yet to be written.’ Geoff Brandwood died unexpectedly in 2021, leaving a completed manuscript which the editors have made into an attractive and very helpful publication, complete with a bibliography, chronological list of works, notes and excellent illustrations. There are chapters on stained glass by Martin Harrison and textiles by Beryl Patten. The meticulous and largely unpublished research of the late Paul Joyce (1934-2014) has been central to the writing of this book, which is dedicated to his memory.

Street’s strong work ethic built one of the largest and most impressive careers of any Victorian architect. Piety, profound scholarship and pastoral concern for pupils were accompanied by powerful convictions. ‘No man enjoyed… the luxury of believing his own, and disbelieving other people’s opinion to a more robust extent than Street,’ wrote Beresford Hope. As the young architect to the Diocese of Oxford (1852-6), he set about the restoration of numerous churches and the construction of schools and parsonages in a robust and elemental development of the gothic style. Holidays were usually exhaustive continental research trips. His Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: notes of a tour in the north of Italy (1855) helped spread the taste for Italian gothic; Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (1869), though less influential, is yet to be surpassed as a survey of Hispanic gothic.

Much original and eclectic work sprang from this well-furnished mind. Major Hodson’s tomb at Lichfield is a forceful and glossy reworking of the mid-14th century Arsendi monument in Padua. The Ralli Mausoleum in the Greek corner of West Norwood Cemetery combines the fourth-century Anatolian barrel-topped tombs of Xanthos with early French gothic. This is the Street that is easiest to admire.

This originality is seen on a larger scale, for example, in St Philip and St James, Oxford; St James the Less, Westminster; in the spire that crowns his rebuilding of Wheatley church near Oxford; and in the uncompromising silhouette at Denstone in Staffordshire. The Strand frontage of Street’s great public work, the Royal Courts of Justice (1868- 82), is full of drama and incident. In the elevations to Carey Street and Bell Yard, dazzling contrasts of brick and Portland stone combine with eventful massing and expressive asymmetry. The stony Great Hall is one of the most impressive, measured and elegant of all Victorian interiors.

Street controlled every detail of the work and his distinguished pupils (Norman Shaw, Philip Webb, Edmund and JD Sedding, William Morris, Romaine-Walker and latterly Leonard Stokes) had little scope for creativity in his office. Morris, who left early, was to attack his former friend for heavy-handed church restoration. Street, instrumental in the formation of the RIBA’s Committee on the Conservation of Ancient Monuments in 1863, had inveighed against over-restoration in France and at Lincoln, and undertook technically demanding, hazardous but successful structural procedures at Christ Church Dublin and at York.

But he was working in a changing intellectual climate. His additions to historic churches were always self-confident and frequently clever. The rebuilding of the lost nave of Bristol cathedral (1868- 77), he conceived as a scholarly and rather solemn 13th-century prequel to the remarkably original work in the Decorated style for which this former Augustinian abbey church is so famous. One correspondent to a contemporary local paper was moved to describe it as ‘a husband to the widowed or perhaps virgin choir.’ The happiness of the marriage might divide opinion today.

The pioneer critic of Victorian architecture HS Goodhart-Rendel very much admired the Bristol nave but was not alone in having reservations about some of the products of Street’s formidable output. ‘To convey any adequate realisation of all that Street meant,’ he wrote in 1953, ‘an enormous album would be needed, containing picture after picture of his infinitely varied and numerous works.’ This handsome and compact volume goes a good way to meet that need and will enable modern readers to make a just assessment of the work of this remarkable man.