George Edmund Street
b. Woodford, Essex, 1824;
d. London, 1881.

George Edmund Street,a leading British practitioner and theorist of High Victorian Gothic. After three years in the office of Owen Carter of Winchester, he worked in Scott’s London office 1845-9. He practised in Oxford (1852-6) and subsequently in London. A member of the Ecclesiological Society, he was Oxford diocesan architect (1850-81). His earliest buildings used English Gothic as their source, but by the mid-1850s his viewpoint, articulated in Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages, had became Ruskinian and eclectic. His buildings reflected his belief that modern needs could be met through a vigorous synthesis of French ecclesiastical architecture (which he regarded as “the noblest and most masculine”) and the more hybrid forms and secular applications of Italian Gothic. Like RUSKIN, he advocated constructional polychromy (he used it powerfully at St James-the-Less), and his emphasis on materials and organic decoration anticipated the Arts & Crafts movement and influenced William MORRIS, Philip WEBB, and Norman SHAW, who were among his pupils. For his major work, the rebuilding of the Royal Courts of Justice, Street produced a complex and irregularly picturesque synthesis of 13-century English, French and Italian forms. He received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1874.