Street, George Edmund

▪ British architect

born June 20, 1824, Woodford, Essex, Eng.

died Dec. 18, 1881, London

 English architect of the High Victorian period, noted for his many English churches in the Gothic Revival style.

      Street worked as an assistant to George Gilbert Scott (Scott, Sir George Gilbert) in London for five years. He opened his own practice in 1849 and designed about 260 buildings during his professional career, the majority for ecclesiastical use. Street's buildings were usually highly original, unconventional adaptations and bold restylings of 13th-century French and English Gothic architecture. Starting with a number of small churches and schools in Cornwall, his works proliferated throughout England—in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, and Yorkshire. These churches vary in appearance from the elaborate and decorative St. James the Less (1858–61), London, to the barren austerity of St. George's (1861), Oakengates, Shropshire. His most famous work, however, was a secular building, the nobly picturesque Law Courts (Royal Courts of Justice) in London—competed for in 1866, begun in 1874, and finished in 1882, after Street's death.

      Street was a close friend of many of the Pre-Raphaelite (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) artists and helped train such masters of late 19th-century English architecture and design as William Morris (Morris, William), Philip Webb (Webb, Philip Speakman), and Richard Norman Shaw (Shaw, Norman). Street was the diocesan architect to Oxford, York, Winchester, and Ripon. He was also professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he lectured on medieval architecture, and in 1881 he was elected president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His publications, Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855) and Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (1865; reprinted 1969), illustrated with his own drawings, were widely used as sourcebooks for Gothic Revival architectural detail.

Additional Reading

Arthur Edmund Street, Memoir of George Edmund Street, R.A., 1824–1881 (1888, reprinted 1972), includes Street's Royal Academy lectures of 1881. David B. Brownlee, The Law Courts: The Architecture of George Edmund Street (1984), describes the competition and Street's designs.

* * *